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Although immigration has always been an essential aspect of the human condition, the globalization and technical advances of the modern world have brought it to the center of our attention. However, this is still a largely unexplored field in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Salman Akhtar's lucid and perceptive book, therefore, constitutes an opportune and valuable contribution to the study of one of the
most pressing everyday challenges of our present world. Akhtar's empathy for his subject (derived partly from his own experience as an immigrant), his clarity of understanding, and his poetic nature make of his book a splendid contribution to a systematized and integrated comprehension of the mourning processes and vicissitudes of identity that are demanded by drastic changes in sociocultural and psychological environment.
Immigration is a complex psychosocial phenomenon; it mobilizes a multifaceted process of destabilization/restabilization with outcomes that may range along a continuum from the normal to the highly pathological. In chapter 1, Akhtar elucidates ten psychosocial variables that may influence these outcomes. Among these are: circumstances and reasons for migration; access to “refueling”; preimmigration character; intercultural marriages; and birth of children in the new land. In addition, Akhtar explores seven other variables largely unaddressed in the immigration literature, such as: the role of bodily characteristics; the impact of gender (e.g., women seem to adapt much better to immigration); and legal status. Among all these variables Akhtar rightly underscores the significance of character organization (as opposed to character traits): i.e., the capacity for intrapsychic separateness and individuation. I myself would think it more precise to refer to this variable as the level of personality organization: that is, the degree of differentiation and integration of personality development (Kernberg 1984; McWilliams 1994; Garza-Guerrero 2000).
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