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Silently we went round and round
And through each hollow mind
The Memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind …
As an immigrant, one is profoundly de-territorialized. Innocence is lost: absolutes have been replaced with relativism, things-in-themselves with ever-present dialectical tension. One thinks, “Back home, such and such was the case. Here, on the other hand…” As the Palestinian-American author Edward Said (1994) points out, an immigrant will never truly arrive anywhere, nor has he ever left his native coast. We float in the space in between, always busy reinventing ourselves and our homelands, always on the lookout for our kin — those who, like ourselves, bear on their foreheads the mark of exile. When we find them, we anchor ourselves in them and, for a brief moment, feel at home. A moment later, we are back in the open sea.
Said's poetic rendering of the immigrant's struggle reminds me of Laing's (1960) notion of ontological insecurity — the sense of confusion, isolation, and terrifying lack of certainty characterizing psychotic experience. In the psychotic world, as in an unfamiliar country, things are unknown and unknowable. One is never sure who one is, who the other is, or what is to come.
What happens when someone who lacks basic ontological security is subjected to the colossal stress of immigration? Analytic literature on immigration is limited, and the authors writing on this topic typically focus on neurotic-level processes. Grinberg and Grinberg (1989) discuss the sustained object loss endured by the immigrant who has separated from family and