What Refugees Teach Us: Clinical Hypotheses

Abstract

This work reports on a clinic of listening, support and psychological care for a population of a home where asylum seekers and illegal immigrants coexist. The clinic with migrants and refugees that this article will present must be placed in a context. On the one hand, the situation of migrants concerns an increasingly large part of the world population. Then we must understand that the journey of those we call migrants is complex and trying, often marked by three kinds of confrontation with murderous or stigmatizing dominations: dislocations from the worlds of yesteryear, journeys of exile marked by the violence of human trafficking, encountering an assignment in non-places, and an increasingly police-like treatment of their lives in France. This generalization of exile and, likewise, these accumulations of difficulties and serious violence suffered by those who today seek refuge far from where they were born must invite us to rethink the condition that I will call, following A. Noos, "exilic"[1]. We use and abuse the notion of trauma. It is our responsibility to situate the Figure of the Other[2] that emerges in such traumas, to situate what can still psychically shift when the human body is subjected to forces and dominations that socially and politically tend to instrumentalize it, dehumanize it, and even annihilate it. I therefore invite here a resumption of these terms of exile and trauma. Their use must find new lines of definition. These also force our mental habits. We must, with them, think about this new condition of the contemporary world: the tectonic catastrophe of the populations of our planet.