Presentation Announcements by Ruth Lijtmaer (USA)

“Introduction to Panel” & “A World Without Borders”

In: Real and Imagined Borders: When Interior and Exterior Harden and Collapse. International Forum for Psychoanalytic Educations (IFPE). Toronto, Canada, October 18, 2019.

In her paper, Lijtmaer distinguishes between immigrants and exiles/refugees. Through a clinical case, her presentation questions: How can patients and analysts deal with wars that displace people from one country to another, leaving them not knowing if they will be welcomed? What is the emotional price in the individual when faced with borders that separate people?

“Where Do I Belong? I Do Not Have a Home: I Am a Refugee”

In: On Border Crossings and Displacements: Reflections by Border-Crossing Migrants on Belonging, Identity, and the Politics of the “Illegal Traveller. Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society (APCS). New Brunswick, NJ, October 25-26, 2019.

Lijtmaer describes how closed borders make it almost impossible for refugees to settle in peaceful lands and restore a sense of safety. Like human bodies, nations are imagined to have boundaries to defend against alien entities seeking to contaminate the body politic. Immigrants and refugees are conceived as invaders, creeping through porous boundaries, threatening to destroy a vulnerable self. Asylum seekers will be or are already suffering PTSD due to massive psychic trauma, which will be transmitted to the next generations. They find every aspect of their waking and dreaming lives permeated by the sense of a collapsed self. They lost their home and cannot find a new one.

Ruth Lijtmaer, PhD
88 West Ridgewood Ave.
Ridgewood, New Jersey 07450
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