Editorial

For our second issue we are pleased to present papers and commentaries presented initially to an IPA/UNESCO sponsored conference in Peru entitled “At the Threshold of the Millennium.” This issue is one of several special issues planned for the future. It deals with aspects of complicated mourning and the way in which one's cultural background creates difficulties in adjustment to another culture in another country whether the individual has voluntarily immigrated, been exiled or is a refugee. Problems suffered by immigrants are of increasing importance to the mental health community as well as to society as a whole, not only because increasing numbers of psychiatrists originate from different cultures, but also because we have been, as a society, in the midst of the largest unanticipated influx of immigrants since before World War I (Rumbaut, 1991). We believe that it is particularly important to familiarize ourselves with these problems because we, in our young country, often expect these immigrants to abandon their cultural heritage and join the American melting pot to emerge as fully assimilated “Americans.”

The linking theme in these papers is nostalgia for the memory of one's own country through the lenses of the quasi acculturated immigrant. These scholars examine in rich detail the pathological and healthy variations in nostalgia, together with the variety of stories or themes woven together to memorialize aspects of the culture and experience for future generations. These stories include among them those of “chosen trauma” and the difficulties created for future generations by these chosen trauma (Volkan, 1997). According to these scholars, in clinical work with individual patients, in small groups, and in mediation of community problems and political disputes, how people see and present their cultural traditions, their relationships to others, their own personal strengths and weaknesses is clearly tinged with and overdetermined by complex emotions and ideas.