My Country My Self Separation, Identity, and Dissonance

“It is the symbolic codes of our first language and culture which provide the first scaffolding for the self and our first existential maps — ways of perceiving and organizing human and social experience through which, or within which, we can feel and think.”

A young man came to see me suffering from what he described as an “identity crisis.” He felt lost and didn't know who he was or what he wanted. His family had fled from their country of origin during a time of war and could no longer return without the threat of imprisonment or death. The country continued to be a dangerous place for foreigners or former citizens to return to. The young man had been born in the UK and had never set foot in the country where his family came from. He described the strange feeling he had when he was asked where he was from and could only answer that he was from the country of his family but had never been there. At the age of five, when his British teacher asked where he was born, he replied, “In a British Airways airplane.” This aptly portrayed his state of dislocation, of being neither here nor there, but truly in a no man's land.

Masha Gessen, a Russian journalist now living in the United States, writing about her parents' decision to leave Moscow for America when she was thirteen, describes the “syncope of emigration” as “the difference between discovering who I was… and discovering who I could be. … It was a moment of choice and, thanks to the ‘break in my destiny,’ I was aware of it.” (Gessen, 2018) Only when there is a break in one's life does the question of identity and belonging arise. At these moments, we are faced with a choice — not only between past and present, between membership in one group or another, between geographically staying and leaving, but also a more fundamental choice that concerns our identity: who we see ourselves as being, what is it we believe in, a