You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a late afternoon in high summer. The tax-free zone of the Northern European airport is heaving with humanity. Some jostling, some sauntering, others assessing the wares: the cigarettes, chocolates, and discounted liquors. Mirrored sunglasses are displayed on video screens against hang-gliders and California surfers, smiling at us from halfway around the world. Attractive boutiques feature Danish cafetieres, Italian handbags, and Chinese silks. The seats in the food court are full; and the tables are filthy with litter as customers sipping designer coffees turn their attentions in competitive search for an available power point to charge their electronic devices.
This transient snapshot reflects the most equalizing demonstration of toleration in our globalizing world: the external signs of difference, the hijab, the kippah, the dhoti, together with piercings, tattoos, and business casual, are all held in ticketed, validated passage from one place to another. All is calm in this interregnum between security clearance and boarding in a waiting room determined by the narcissistic flattening of economic sufficiency. Momentarily, each of us is good enough, exempted from being targeted as the reservoir of another's unwanted, disclaimed, and projected images. None of us is the Other, because, as Vamik Volkan explains it, to become Other, one must pass “through the border surrounding the host people” (p. 95); and each of us now occupies the indeterminate, transitionally physical zone between the airport's final checkpoint and the immigration agent at our ticketed point of arrival.
Vamik Volkan's Immigrants and Refugees: Trauma, Perennial Mourning, and Border Psychology makes psychoanalytic concepts available for the reader's reckoning not only with such passing moments in airport transit, but also for engaging the broader world-shaking events of 21st century social reality: of ethnic and religious intolerance; of population displacement; of terrorism's violence; and of n