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Cross-cultural passages encompass many forms. A person forced to leave his or her native country to seek political asylum in a foreign land with little hope of ever returning to his or her country of origin is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples (Grinberg and Grinberg, 1989). Less dramatic, but still compelling in their emotional impact on the person undergoing the process, are cross-cultural passages associated with the search for economic advantages, for example, the European migration to the United States during the last century or the migrations from east to west or from south to north within the United States.
Cultural relocation continues to have an effect on the children and grandchildren of immigrants. They must struggle with a cultural relocation of their own as they find a place in a country or cultural geographical situation that might feel more familiar to them than to their parents or grandparents. Specific instances of the latter case are people belonging to cultural minorities who attain financial and educational success that allows their entry into social and economic circles inaccessible to their parents.
Although cross-cultural passages vary, there seem to be significant commonalities in the psychological processes that they unleash in the person undergoing the journey. These psychological processes have been explored recently in the psychoanalytic literature (Grinberg and Grinberg, 1989; Levy-Warren, 1987) and in general psychiatric and psychological literature (Padilla, 1980), where the term acculturation is used to refer to the changes in behavior, values, cognitions, and emotional responses occurring in people of one culture as the result of their interaction with another culture (Berry, 1980).
Since continuous contact with another culture unchains a process that often leads to a transformation of internal structures and internalized object relations, we prefer to use the term cultural transformation. Acculturation conveys the idea of passag