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One of Jung's most significant contributions concerns the mysterious, inexplicable and always out-of-reach nature of the self. In this paper, I will focus on the borders of the self and their nature, location and dynamics of maintenance and change in geographically, historically, and culturally situated subjects. Reflecting on the refugee experience, I intend to gain more insights into our psychic functioning and the dynamics of the self in relation to itself, the other and groups. The experiences of some refugees, marked bysignificant trauma and migration, shed light on how the boundaries of the self are frequently contested and perpetually negotiated with others, and how our subjectivity is shaped by ongoing dynamics of occupation, dispute and/or negotiation, conducted at various levels of our social and individual existence. My argument is that these processes occur at a specific site: the boundaries of the self, involving intrapsychic, interpersonal and group psychological dynamics, with reverberations in the socio-political and cultural spheres, and reciprocal influences between all these levels. This paper aims to concentrate on the shifts in these boundaries, illustrated through clinical vignettes., (© 2024 The Author(s). Journal of Analytical Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Society of Analytical Psychology.)

This paper investigates the relations between displacement, home, trauma and the self in the experience of refugees, which has become an issue of unexpected and far-reaching proportions in recent times. It questions to what extent and under what conditions displacement in the world may be traumatic and how trauma may be considered the effect of an inner displacement. Refugees' lives are marked by forced migration that is related to a certain suffering due to the changes in their family, relational, social and cultural lives. The paper explores the extent to which these changes can represent a break so significant as to be traumatic. It outlines the way in which traumatic experiences can produce an inner displacement and reorganization of one's mental life that leads to a focus on traumatic complexes. Under the most severe traumatic conditions, this can be understood as a displacement of the central axis of Self, in which the ego complex yields its position to other complexes, with a deep change in the organization and functioning of self. The experience of refugees highlights the way in which we live in a matrix of conscious and unconscious links between inner and outer worlds that need deeper and simultaneous consideration to understand their implications and mutual resonances for the psyche. Clinical cases of refugees will illustrate some aspects of these interconnections., (© 2020, The Society of Analytical Psychology.)

This paper presents a tentative understanding of the characteristics of the extreme traumas, elsewhere called 'complex PTSD', that some refugees and asylum-seekers bring into therapy. It suggests that these kinds of traumas suffered during adulthood may involve a disintegration of the self and a loss of 'psychic skin'. This conceptualization is derived from the treatment of a refugee who survived multiple extreme traumas and with whom efforts were made in therapy to identify a complex methodology making use of supplementary therapeutic tools in addition to individual psychotherapy. The case demonstrates how the disintegration of self implies not only a deep somato-psychic dissociation, but also a loss of intrapsychic and interpersonal space. In the treatment this was worked through via repetition of the victim-aggressor dynamics at multiple levels. In the end, the therapeutic context was structured like a set of concentric layers, creating a 'bandage' over the patient's wounds whilst his 'psychic skin' was able to regenerate. The conditions triggered by extreme traumas in refugees challenge some of the cornerstones of individual psychoanalytic technique, as well as the idea that individual therapy may be thought of as existing in an environmental vacuum., (© 2017, The Society of Analytical Psychology.)

One of Jung's most significant contributions concerns the mysterious, inexplicable and always out‐of‐reach nature of the self. In this paper, I will focus on the borders of the self and their nature, location and dynamics of maintenance and change in geographically, historically, and culturally situated subjects. Reflecting on the refugee experience, I intend to gain more insights into our psychic functioning and the dynamics of the self in relation to itself, the other and groups. The experiences of some refugees, marked bysignificant trauma and migration, shed light on how the boundaries of the self are frequently contested and perpetually negotiated with others, and how our subjectivity is shaped by ongoing dynamics of occupation, dispute and/or negotiation, conducted at various levels of our social and individual existence. My argument is that these processes occur at a specific site: the boundaries of the self, involving intrapsychic, interpersonal and group psychological dynamics, with reverberations in the socio‐political and cultural spheres, and reciprocal influences between all these levels. This paper aims to concentrate on the shifts in these boundaries, illustrated through clinical vignettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article aims to provide an overview of our experience in therapeutic work carried out in Italy with asylum seekers and refugees. A first part addresses more generally the question of refugees in Italy during the last five years – difficult times for national (and international) politics – also taking into account recent political and health challenges that are affecting the emotional atmosphere in the country. The second part deals more specifically with therapeutic work involving refugees, the fragmented stories of those who flee their homes and experience excruciating hardships along their journey as they search for a safer haven. Human beings carry along these almost Dantean circles first of all in their bodies, which are often marked by violence. They are bodies in which pain, abuse, anger, guilt, wounds and shame are inscribed; in the most severe cases, these bodies are even "dispossessed", deprived of an agent. The uprooted and traumatized body is often the main vehicle for communicating very difficult, even unthinkable experiences in therapy. A "body to body" communication of sorts enables the patient to establish contact with the therapist, making it possible, through a long laborious process, to re-narrate and lend meaning to traumatic inhuman experiences. In our work we have observed how bodily experience, intra-psychic and interpersonal dynamics and the dynamics of large groups in political and social contexts are closely interconnected, and how this cross-cutting interconnection is crucial for psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a tentative understanding of the characteristics of the extreme traumas, elsewhere called "complex PTSD", that refugees and asylumseekers bring into therapy. It suggests that these kinds of traumas suffered during adulthood may involve a disintegration of the self and a loss of "psychic skin". This conceptualization is derived from the treatment of a refugee who survived multiple extreme traumas and with whom efforts were made in therapy to identify a complex methodology making use of supplementary, therapeutic tools in addition to individual psychotherapy. The case demonstrates how the disintegration of the self implies not only a deep somato-psychic dissociation but also a loss of intrapsychic and interpersonal space. In the treatment this was worked through via repetition of victim-aggressor dynamics at multiple levels. In the end, the therapeutic context was structured like a set of concentric layers, creating a "bandage" over the patient's wounds whilst his "psychic skin" was able to regenerate. The conditions triggered by extreme traumas in refugees challenge some of the cornerstones of individual psychoanalytic technique as well as the idea that individual therapy exists in an environmental vacuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]