A Psycho-Semiotic Study of the Adaptation of Salvadoran Families to Canada

The most common and deepest space within which we think about us is called culture. Culture is the way people express their patterns of thought, their phantasies, their dreams and their behaviour, their values, beliefs, political, economical and religious, their rules of conduct. Culture is the space where we pass on from one generation to the next, through language, our psychic and social heritage. For Davidson (1988) and Harrington (1993), psychoanalysis is part of culture and offers us paths to understand our psyche and our unconscious. Psychoanalysis and anthropology have in common the fact that they attempt to analyze common ground cultural phenomena such as social and psychic structures. Human beings link to each other through language and unconscious structures (Calogeras & Alston, 1980).

In this article I apply psychoanalysis to understand culture and migration, refugee adaptation through a new society, a new culture: Salvadoran families’ adaptation to Canada. To that effect,

1. The psychosemiotics method will be used through the analysis of different spaces of action and temporality and

2. A psychoanalytic interpretation will be used.

Baudry (1984) and Esman (1998) proposed different conceptualizations and applications to psychoanalysis and culture in clinical and extraclinical settings. Baudry F. (1984) in his essay on “Method in applied psychoanalysis” argues and examines the different applications of psychoanalysis to literature and the difficulties of it. Esman A. (1998) discusses in his paper “What is applied in applied psychoanalysis?” discusses the different applications of psychoanalytic concepts to culture, its extrapolations, and ambiguities. He attempts to argue that “such ‘applications’ were integral to the