Psychoanalysis and the situation of refugees: A human rights perspective

Abstract

We have today the highest number of persons who have been displaced due to war, persecution and terror since the Second World War. More than 65 million people are currently displaced, either internally or as refugees. Most are in developing countries with a small portion having reached western, high-income countries. Borders to western countries have however been increasingly difficult to pass and there is disproportionate anxiety about and resistance to receiving refugees. Refugees as a group experience abundant human rights abuses and perhaps as a group, experience the most severe, prolonged, and extreme traumatisation and complicated losses today. Flight has become increasingly dangerous. Large numbers of people are exposed to sickness producing circumstances, inhumane conditions, and danger of death. Basic human rights are violated before, during and after flight. This chapter will focus on how human rights violations can damage psychic and somatic health and produce illness for both the individual and the group. International human rights declarations and laws aim at protecting health and quality of life. It is necessary that psychoanalysts understand the direct influence on the psyche of violations of these rights and how they affect psychic economy, affect regulation, relational capacities, and family and caretaking functions. It will be argued that psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts can play a crucial role in both prevention and treatment, in line with earlier psychoanalytic pioneers as John Bowlby and René Spitz. The situation now is serious with large groups of refugees living under appalling conditions at Europe’s border and in low-income countries around the world. There are great risks for younger generations through transgenerational processes of transmission of suffering.