Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves: Edited by Julia Beltsiou. New York: Routledge, 2016. 224 pp.

The early émigré analysts, deeply traumatized by the cataclysmic events in mid-twentieth-century Europe, wrote little about their experience of dislocation. Hardly eager to draw attention to their ethnic origins, which had brought them nothing but persecution, they adapted to their new lands quickly and, with little modification, resumed psychoanalytic work with their culturally unfamiliar patients. This stance was curious, since the massive, protracted, and transgenerationally transmitted trauma of Holocaust had itself, once and for all, established that the human mind, even in its invisible depths, was affected by alterations in its sociopolitical surround. The idea that the stability of psychic structure is dependent on “stimulus nutriment” from external reality thus took root.† Coupled with the concepts of “average expectable environment,”† “reality constancy,”† and “waking screen,”† this laid the groundwork for the new wave of immigrant analysts to explore how a radical shift in ecology and culturally syntonic life patterns affects matters of identity, subjectivity, and belonging. Less traumatized than their elders and less dominated by the hegemony of psychic determinism, these analysts opened up a new realm of psychoanalytic theorizing. The fact that the demographic

composition of the Western world was rapidly changing and that the monolithic shell of “classic” psychoanalytic theory was cracking also came to their aid.

Grinberg and Grinberg broke fresh gr