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This book makes a significant contribution to understanding a topic that still has not found its place within the psychoanalytic literature. Migration is a complex phenomenon and it is characterized by the interrelation of the external and the intrapsychic world. Psychoanalytic thinking is mostly preoccupied with internal processes, so the influence of the concrete, spatial environment upon the psyche has not been thought about enough. Salman Akhtar comments in an interview given at UCL (2016) that what the immigrant is longing for is not the people but the landscape, the familiar objects. According to Akhtar the human experience can be revived in the new country by associating with people alike but the objects cannot be re-found, they are permanently left behind in the home country. If this point is taken seriously enough, inevitably the importance of the spatial environment for the psyche demands further investigation.
In the introduction to the book, Beltsiou points out how psychoanalysis was developed and expanded by immigrants during the Second World War. This