Time of trauma, land of asylum

Exodus, Exile, Asylum

For many asylum seekers, exile is not a journey, but a peril, a physical and psychological confrontation with death. The trauma may well lie in the migration, but it lies above all in the violence that has shattered cultural frameworks and frightened the psyche. Trauma, an a-historical abyss, suspends the meaning of personal history. How can we find a land of asylum when trauma radically disassociates the subject from the collective and puts his or her social presence in crisis? How can we find a land of asylum when the foreign migrant is suspect for the host country, encounters and relives violence, and is denied political space? It is the subjective expression of the exile and the possible reconstruction of a psychic space-time that are at stake in the psychotherapeutic consultation, giving the latter an unprecedented political dimension.