Refugees, their situation and treatment needs

Abstract

The number of displaced persons today is the highest since World War II. Flight has become increasingly dangerous and refugees are now in poorer health conditions. Severe traumatization happens in their home-countries but atrocities under flight is increasing, including torture, trafficking and death. It has become increasingly difficult to reach Western countries and those who come now meet difficult conditions with poor living conditions and growing xenophobia. There are unmet treatment needs in the refugee population and lack of early preventive measures. Many severely traumatized will also need qualified psychotherapy. This article presents a psychoanalytic view on traumatization and describes specific features of psychoanalytic therapy with severely traumatized refugees. A case example is presented to illustrate how the analyst inevitably becomes involved in traumatization related mental scenarios and how this involvement may provoke countertransference enactment. It is demonstrated how this may be solved in the therapeutic process and facilitate integration of traumatic experiences and loss.

Parental PTSD and school performance in 16-year-olds – a Swedish national cohort study

“…Refugees often have especially complex conditions due to difficult experiences before and during flight in combination with adverse social and socioeconomic circumstances in the new society. In addition, the asylum process often constitutes a long period of uncertainty and insecurity, and refugees often lack social networks and experience stigmatisation or discrimination [4][5][6]. This emphasizes the importance of considering the family context, which may contribute to differences between refugee and non-refugee families.…”

Flight and migration from Africa to Europe: contributions of psychology and social work

“…This first empathetic contact is needed to confront the overwhelming power of dehumaniaation, a destructive process that forms the basis of interpersonal violence and which is ingrained in many supposedly democratic institutions. (Jovi� , 2018: 193;Varvin, 2015Varvin, , 2018Neumann, 2018; This has proven to be particularly difficult because the current situation reminds people that severe trauma in the context of so-called man-made disasters not only burdens or even destroys the lives of one generation but is often transmitted to children and grandchildren.…”

The unconscious in terror: An overview of psychoanalytic contributions to the psychology of terrorism and violent radicalization

“…Today, Bion's original conceptualization of groups as performing the function of the mother in containing and making meaning of the (mostly traumatic or unbearably negative) raw experience of their members is partially supported by empirical neuro‐psychoanalytic models concerning the role of the caregiver in promoting the ability of the child to mentalize, namely, to embed both conscious and unconscious life experience in a stable, realistic, and adaptive internal representation of the world that are accessible to conscious (metacognitive) reflection (Fonagy, ; Fonagy & Bateman, ; see also Fairbairn, ). Conversely, some of Anna Freud's initial observations in regard to the “identification with the aggressor” have now been reconceptualized as the violent manifestations of the increase in impulsivity and emotional dysregulation brought about by the impact of a traumatic political conflict on the mentalization capabilities of the individual or the collective (Fonagy, quoted in Hough, ; Luyten, Campbell, & Fonagy, ; Varvin, , ). This is consistent with the apparent cyclical nature of terrorist violence, often observed throughout world history, in which a terrorized nation resorts to inflicting terror on their designated enemy, only to suffer further terror attacks by that terrorized enemy in retaliation (Akhtar, ; Halperin, ; Lundesgaard & Krogh, ).…”

“…As an unconscious mental representation that is shared on a tacit‐yet‐widespread level, the chosen trauma permeates the culture from its governing institutions and leaders to individuals and families and is thus unconsciously transmitted transgenerationally to children by their caregivers (Volkan, ). This model can be generalized to account for a variety of other communal dynamics that might lead to violence, such as shared mental representations of Arab refugees as the “Chosen Strangers” among right‐wing Europeans (Varvin, ).…”