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In his warm, admiring foreword to this remarkable book, Otto Kernberg calls it “a masterpiece of applied psychoanalysis.” Indeed, the book is a thoughtful, ambitious application of lucid thinking to many of the phenomena involved in migration and exile. The clinical vignettes are scarce and only one lengthy report of strictly analytic work is presented. Yet the most profoundly admirable
feature of this work is that its very existence confirms the hopeful view that crisis, trauma, grief, and mourning can lead to reparation and creativity. It is, as acknowledged by the Grinbergs in their preface, the fruit of their experience: an experience that in manifest form they refer to in terms of their analytic—or at least analytically informed—observations in the three countries where they have lived and practiced. Yet the reader who is familiar with the personal and scientific background and previous work of the Grinbergs, cannot help but be fascinated by the naturalness with which this book seems to have developed. This is a book for our times and for our circles, for our age of mass exodus and political turmoil which results in painful situations of exile. Analysis is besieged on many fronts and it is comforting to know that as Freud did in the decade of the 30s, the Grinbergs have turned their wonderful analytic minds to the study of cultural issues, thus offering their sensitivity and experience to a world larger than that of the analytic community. While this is a book that should be of immense interest to analysts in any community where there are people in transition, it is also a book that—in its study of group processes affecting the immigrants, those left behind, or those who will form the new environment—offers its rich observations to nonanalysts (i.e., social scientists, educators, writers).
The book has 21 chapters, ranging from “Migration and Myth” to “Adoption as Special Migration.” Such a scope suggests that the Grinbergs have attempted a more ambitious task