The salience of borders in the experience of refugees

In this chapter, the author explores the special significance of borders in the experience of refugees, which is, in a broad sense, characterized by their violation, at different levels, psychological, social, and political. In particular, I would like to examine the meaning, the function, and the effects of such violations, and their implications, keeping in mind the narratives of refugees who arrived from Africa and the Middle East to Europe through the Mediterranean Sea, and my clinical experience as a Jungian analyst with them. Although I do not intend to approach clinical material here, this text is informed with ideas and narratives and information collected during sessions with refugee patients. From the analysis of the salience of borders in refugees’ experience, a certain number of other features of psychic life emerge as implications or secondary elements: (1) the extent to which individual and collective psychic life is rooted in the space we inhabit; (2) the psychological dynamics between the individual self and the wider social context in relation to the making of identities; (3) the relationship between the individual’s body and the political life of a group; (4) the importance of ‘psychic skin’ and, more generally, of ‘borders’ as a place of reworking and the transformation of individual and collective self and identity; (5) the relationship between trauma and borders; and (6) the relational and mutual nature of identity processes.