“A Sacred Sacrifice?” Exploring Children's Meaning-Making of Separation from Their Parents Due to Political Reasons

The present study explored the experiences of the (now adult) offspring of former political prisoners who at a young age were forced to be separated from their parents due to political reasons. During the Greek Civil War and its aftermath, thousands of people were detained in prisons or were sent to concentration camps on remote islands and were thus separated from their families and young children. This particular form of parent-child separation, laden with political and ideological tension, has rarely been studied before from the viewpoint of the children. In the present research, 10 adult men and women who as children were separated from both their parents due to political reasons were interviewed about their current perspectives on their childhood experiences. Their narratives were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), a qualitative research method that can offer material suitable for psychodynamic understanding. The analysis of the interviews yielded the overarching theme “sacred sacrifice” and seven subordinate themes, “parental idealization,” “following parental footsteps,” “justification of separation,” “emotional effects of separation,”“political relationship with parents,”“sense of belonging,” and gender differences between “mothers and fathers.” The themes demonstrated that ideology as the perceived etiology of separation defined at large the participants' understanding and meaning-making of their experiences. The participants' defensive maneuvers and self-reflective functioning are also discussed.