Lot's Wife, Cary Grant, and the American Dream: Psychoanalysis with Immigrants*

This paper explores two dimensions of experience common to all immigrants, whether they have chosen to emigrate or external circumstances have forced the choice on them: the loss of contextual continuity and the consequences of being an outsider in the new culture. Drawing on the contemporary literature on multiple discontinuous self-states, it is proposed that for many immigrants dissociated aspects of self-experience symbolize their original culture. Whether these dissociated states are idealized and felt to be unattainable in the new culture, or denigrated and warded off in a bid to make new connections, if they are not made conscious, examined, mourned over, and reintegrated, the immigrant will experience herself like Lot's wife, turned into a pillar of salt, her gaze fixed forever on the lost world. Or alternatively, in cutting herself off from a despised world from which she fled, she will also cut herself off from valuable aspects of self-experience inadvertently discarded in the act of immigration. Extensive case material is used to demonstrate the conclusion that being an immigrant is not about assimilation, but about a process of mutual accommodation between self-states that hold different passports.