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Leon and Rebecca Grinberg, two Argentinian psychoanalysts now living and practicing in Spain, lead their readers early on to expect a psychoanalytic study of one of the most devastating problems facing the world today: the sufferings of millions who, because of political and economic oppression,
are daily being uprooted and forced to run for their very lives. Instead, the book turns out to be foremost an account of voluntary migration and self-induced exile on the part of patients in psychoanalysis looking to improve their status and/or financial position. It does not even deal with the personal dilemma arising out of another kind of ubiquitous exile, the internal one, reflecting the isolation of individuals who refuse to conform to the mold of things: the outsider as described in Colin Wilson's classic by that name.
What the authors do present us with is an often very elegant psychoanalytic description of neurotic behavior on the part of patients facing a move from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This is, of course, informative and often presented with depth and originality. It is, however, when the Grin-bergs attempt to generalize from these neurotic (or sometimes borderline) reactions to behaviors emerging out of the very real life and death issue of those fleeing persecution, torture, and the threat of death itself, that their study needs to be faulted. This is a problem we have met with before: wherever the attempt is made to deal with behaviors arising out of extremity in terms of behaviors arising out of neurotic conflict. DesPres (1976) put it eloquently in his study of concentration camp behavior: When behavior arises out of conditions characterized by the extremes of distress and desperation, “when death itself is the determinant, then behavior has no ‘meaning” at all in a symbolic or psychological sense”. In other words, the psychoanalytic method is here misleading if it deals with such behavior as if it were symbolic and mediated.
Survival in such situat