Prologue: The Refugee Experience

More people than ever before in history are living as refugees. Wars, political persecution, life-threatening poverty, domestic and gang-related violence as well as devastating natural and human-caused disasters have driven them from their homes and homelands. Rather than receiving shelter and protection in the places they have risked their lives to enter, many face insurmountable barriers and further psychological and physical harm.

The world of refugees is our world. But given the relative safety and comfort many of us enjoy, it may seem difficult to comprehend—or even imagine—living as a refugee. What is it like to leave behind everything that once gave life meaning and order? How much courage is required to flee toward the unknown? What is the feeling of being regarded as alien and unwelcome? How can one bear the possibility of never seeing loved ones again?

Perhaps it is only fitting that we asked psychoanalysts to help us understand the experience of being a refugee. After all, its founder was himself a refugee. Sigmund Freud was forced to leave Austria for London when the Anschluss threatened his family and his own existence. Theodor Reik, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Heinz Kohut and many other prominent analysts sought refuge in the United States.

We open this issue with an article by two Iranian émigrés, Gita Zarnegar and Ahmad-Reza Mohammadpour-Yazdi entitled, “The Long Winding Road to Liberation: The Tales of Two Iranian Immigrants.” They draw on their own personal experiences of exile from different periods in Iran’s sociopolitical history. Fom the perspective of Intersubjectivity and nonlinear dynamic systems theories, Zarnegar, who emigrated to the U.S. before the Islamic Revolution, explains how psychoanalysis provided a means of adaptation and acculturation. She provides brief historical sketches of Iran and Iranian Jews and describes the limitations of psychoanalysis in Iran.

Mohammadpour-Yazdi, who emigrated to Austria following the Islamic Revolution, uses