Editor's Introduction: Children of Immigrants

Immigration from one country to another is a complex psychosocial process with lasting effects upon an individual's identity. The sudden change from an average expectable environment (Hartmann, 1939) causes much mental pain and disorienting anxiety which, in turn, mobilize a protracted mourning process. In earlier publications on the topic of immigration (Akhtar, 1995, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c), I have discussed the variables affecting the outcome of such mourning and elucidated the multifaceted nature of identity transformation consequent upon immigration. My focus, however, was on the individual as a unit. I more or less overlooked the fact that mourning of deep existential wounds often spans across generations. The impact of the trauma is transgenerationally-transmitted. What the parents can not resolve is passed on as pain, poetry and private myths in the hope of its mentalization (Fonagy and Target, 1997) by the children.

The offspring of immigrants is thus susceptible to becoming the “container” (Bion, 1967) of the unspoken residues of their parents' mourning. Depending upon when they were born and reared in the course of the parental acculturation and depending upon the magnitude of cultural differences between the home and street culture, such children might show conscious and unconscious difficulties in synthesizing their own identities. They are faced with the task of negotiating a greater than ordinary linguistic, moral and idiomatic chasm between their families (“I have two foreigners living at home with me,” wryly quipped an immigrant seventeen year old) and the culture-at-large. Lack of acceptance by “native” peers fuels their anguish and outraged sense of puzzlement. It is not easy for someone born locally to be repeatedly asked the question “So, where are you from?”

To be sure, there is a positive dimension to growing up with immigrant parents as well. Such parents often possess a quality of industry, ambition, and work-related diligence that makes them goo