Editorial

We open this edition with three papers from our one-day conference, 'Displacement - Contemporary Traumatic Experience’, which took place in London in November 2019. Our appreciation of displacement reflects both a response to the profound social issue relating to the displacement of millions of individuals from their homes and countries of birth, as well as a recognition of the foundational role of environment, place and culture in our psyches; it would not be too much to say that the environment is one of the factors that embodies and constitutes the ground of our being, as Amanda Dowd's paper explores in depth.

We begin with Monica Luci's paper, which gives us an insight into her work with refugees and describes how, when there has been significant trauma, the traumatic complexes can displace the ego complex and disrupt the ego-Self relationship. She describes, in fascinating detail, how this disruption manifests in the analytic relationship, how the analyst is inevitably affected, and how the analyst's disrupted thinking and emotional struggles, instead of being a sign of impasse, are characteristic of the analytic process at work.

Ali Zarbafi's paper on building resilience in refugees, as well as describing his clinical work with a refugee patient's underlying, personal traumatic experiences, draws out the relational and socio-cultural issues involved; this focus is amplified by his work being carried out through an interpreter. Amongst other things, his lively paper's focus on work with people from a culture of 'honour and shame’ helps us recognize the additional levels of adjustment that must be addressed in the work with some of those who have been displaced - adjustments that may take more than one generation to achieve.

Amanda Dowd's paper describes the fundamental pattern of psychic functions which operate in an integrated way to simultaneously structure and organize our experience of self-cohesion and self-continuity - she describes this as an implicit psych