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The gripping and penetrating essays in Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis, edited by Paul H. Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn, will heighten the awareness of psychoanalysts regarding the significance of dislocations that result from political and social upheaval and persecution. Such traumas transform not only the person, but often the next generation or two generations.
It is rare in psychoanalytic or historical literature for the analysts or researchers to reveal much about their own childhoods. Many of the contributors in Immigrant Experiences disclose innermost narratives, intertwined with psychological analysis of their own lives as children as well as their migration history, which was often a result of mass persecution, followed by the aftermath of a traumatic dislocation. In addition, the contributors discuss case studies drawn from their analytic practice or research.
Elovitz and Kahn bring a unique perspective to the growing body of literature on ethnicity, a literature that often describes pathology of minority groups. For the most part, Immigrant Experiences is written by successful professionals who candidly and eloquently describe and analyze their own personal migration journey. As such, immigrants in the United States can be understood through patterns of coping and adaptation rather than of mental illness, which makes this book a significant contribution to the growing literature on ethnicity and mental health.
The essays convey the message to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts that unless a personal history includes the social context of the life of an analysand, as well as that of the parents and grandparents of the analysand, interpretations will miss the subtle—and not so subtle-consequences of such events. For example, Paul Elovitz, past president of the International Psychohistory Association, became a historian in order to learn family secrets that resulted from his parents' escape from the pogroms in Russia. He also