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Immigration from one country to another results in a profound alteration of the individual's ecological and psychosocial surround. One is faced with the mental pain of loss and the “disorienting anxieties” (Grinberg and Grinberg, 1969) of adaptation and acculturation. Laceration of the “waking screen” (Pacella, 1980) of perceptions, rupture of temporal continuity in the self-experience, and the inevitable separation from loved ones leads to pain and mourning. Availability of new ego freedoms and weakening of previous social restraints results in threatened breakthrough of sexual, aggressive, acquisitive, and exhibitionistic impulses. This in turn causes anxiety.

The consequence of such destabilization is regression, with the expectable emergence of splitting mechanisms (especially the tendency toward idealization and devaluation) and, sooner or later, a reformulation of identity. Elsewhere, I have delineated the four tracks along which such reconstitution of identity takes place (Akhtar, 1995, 1999). To reiterate, these include the dimensions of affect, mutuality, temporality, and optimal distance. A hybrid identity, which might retain homoethnic or acculturated extremes in sedate isolation or in respectful communion, generally emerges. With continued experience of efficacy and acceptance in the host culture and with passage of time, a greater “fitting together” on interpersonal and intrapsychic basis becomes evident.

Literature pertaining to immigration, including the recently burgeoning psychoanalytic writings on the subject, accommodates the foregoing. However, it seems to pay inoptimal attention to the fact that the postimmigration hybrid identity remains open to challenges from newer developmental tasks arising from life cycle events. In other words, there is hardly any finality or psychic closure to the issue at hand.

With this consideration, I decided to invite a number of colleagues with diverse ethnonational backgrounds (e.g., Australian, Jordanian, Korean, I