Presentation Announcement by Ruth Lijtmaer (USA)

Anxiety and Hope, Faith and Despair: Immigrants are Not Welcomed. No Eulogy for Them.

Lijtmaer, R. (2025). Anxiety and hope, faith and despair: Immigrants are not welcomed. No eulogy for them. International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP) Annual Conference. Pasadena, CA, October 16-19.

Immigration and refugee status can qualify as social traumas. The individual is deprived of a secure holding environment in which to continue living. The government’s lack of empathy for their plight adds to the traumatic experience of looking for a safe place to live. The hurtful state of being an unwanted immigrant, and being dehumanized, operates like a black hole in the person’s mind due to the absence of representations of need-satisfying interactions. There is no basis for symbolic, goal-directed behavior and connections. These experiences of lack of trust in society can be described using Gerson’s  (2009) concept of the “dead third.” In the current USA administration, immigrants are dehumanized, and they are not considered citizens in the eyes of state and federal leaders. Othered because of their skin color, level of education, and social class, they are the target of projection by the white population who feel threatened by these “invaders.”

Soundless Voices that Cannot be Verbalized: Trauma, Immigration and Ignoring the Suffering of the Other

Lijtmaer, R. (2025). Soundless voices that cannot be verbalized: Trauma, immigration and ignoring the suffering of the other. Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) Conference. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, October 10-25, hybrid.

The effects of human rights violations by dehumanization remained silent in individuals and society for many years. Dehumanizing others created metaphors such as virus, vermin, parasites, or the sources of evil, facilitating inhumane acts to occur, such as physical and emotional torture and abuse. To consider people less human makes them seem less worthy of being saved, leaving them to be discarded and unrescued. This is perhaps the fundamental dehumanizing principle. When people feel that their trauma has been unrecognized, they no longer believe in a lawful world.

The Day American Democracy Died

Lijtmaer, R. (2025). The day American democracy died. International Forum for  Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE) Conference. Washington, DC, November 6-9.

I use the term democracy to mean a system of government by the whole population or all eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives, practicing the principles of social equality. It includes respect for human rights, genuine elections by universal suffrage, a pluralistic system of political parties, fundamental freedom of expression and of the press, and freedom of religion and speech. January 20, 2025 is the day that American democracy died. Seduction, lies, betrayal, the casting of illusions, the destruction of healthy boundaries and norms, the transgression against the law and political tradition, the relentless attacks on truth, all of these are elements of sociopolitical perversion that have found a home in the White House.

Ruth Lijtmaer, Ph.D.
Ridgewood, New Jersey, USA
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