From No Name Woman to Birth of Integrated Identity: Trauma-Based Cultural Dissociation in Immigrant Women and Creative Integration

This paper explores the challenges in integration of ethnic identity among a certain segment of immigrant women who have experienced sexism related traumas in their culture of origin. Unlike other immigrant women who may come from a nontraumatic, average expectable environment of their culture of origin into American culture, these women’s assimilative experiences and integration of identity are more complicated by the fact that their ethnic identity is tied to trauma. These women may find a refuge in the American culture, while defensively dissociating from their culture of origin, disavowing ethnic ties, severing contact with family, or avoiding contact with people from the same ethnic group. Their avoidance of their culture of origin amounts to cultural dissociation. Cultural dissociation is hard to detect and work with because cultural phenomenon in general is a blind spot for most American psychoanalysts. I contend that in order to successfully engage dissociated cultural states, a therapist’s ability to self reflect on her cultural situatedness is crucial. The creative challenge of the analyst-patient dyad is to disentangle the patient’s particular traumatic experiences from nontraumatizing normative aspects of the culture of origin in order to promote a viable ethnic identity.