Crossing physical borders and the making of identity

This chapter aims to analyse the problem of the making of identity and the role that crossing physical borders may play. It addresses the question of the role of migration and terrorism in the making of a new European identity as the enactment of two opposite poles of a European cultural complex of an unheroic heroine. Huskinson emphasised that mimetic identifications with human and non-human objects, whether the mother or the physical environment or its objects or a combination of them, are implied in the creative transformations of the self. The mergers and separation of the self vis-a-vis its human and non-human objects are essential to the construction of personal identity and group identity. The body and ‘bodily margins’ – the skin – have a crucial role in ego and self formation and, thereby, in identity formation. The concept of ‘identity’ in analytical psychology inscribes itself into this line of thinking.