With a brick in hand. Transformation in exile

‘I’m like the man who took along a brick/to show the world what his house was like.’ Reflecting on Bertolt Brecht’s brick, which is symbolically taken along from the homeland, allows us the opportunity to explore the changing modalities of traumatic experience in displaced persons. The brick does not merely represent lost objects, home, and homeland but also stands for the displaced person and his psychic integrity. The challenge for every displaced person is to transition away from the basic survival mode, dominated by the drives of self-preservation, to regain the ability to symbolize and to start dreaming again. The way a poet processes his own traumatic experiences of displacement and escape may serve as a roadmap for others. Works by Mario Benedetti and Bertolt Brecht, both émigré poets, alongside clinical examples, form the psychological material. Recurring thoughts of an uncertain return to the homeland may become debilitating, causing a displaced person to descend into mourning or melancholy and can even lead to open outbursts of previously strongly defended aggression. If it is not possible to sufficiently work through the trauma, then the bricks will fall everywhere. In the regressive emotionally charged condition, it holds true: in the beginning was the act.