I recently attended a talk by Virginia De Micco, psychoanalyst and author of Psychoanalytic Work with Migrants and Refugees, titled Trauma, Body, Identity: Bonds and Fractures in the Migratory Experience. It was a profound and at times deeply unsettling exploration of what it truly means to leave one’s country and attempt to build a life elsewhere, particularly for refugees and asylum seekers who did not choose to leave.
What struck me most was that De Micco does not frame migration primarily as a logistical or social challenge. She frames it as a psychic wound.
More Than Learning a New Language
Drawing on the work of Leon and Rebecca Grinberg, De Micco locates traumatic experience at the intersection of individual psyche, relationships, and the cultural framework that holds them together. When migration ruptures that framework, the damage is not merely external. It reaches inward, into the very foundation of who a person understands themselves to be.
She reminded us of Winnicott’s concept of attunement, the way a mother’s responsive gaze allows a child to see themselves reflected, to build a sense of self that feels real and grounded. That early narcissistic investment, the continuous validation of one’s experience, is what gives us an identity rooted in being seen. When a person migrates into a country that does not welcome them, that mirroring fails entirely. There is no reflecting gaze. There is often its opposite.
This is why De Micco insists that migration is not simply about adapting to new habits or mastering a new tongue. It is about identity reformulation. And when that reformulation is forced, when it becomes mimicry rather than authentic growth, something essential is lost.
The Body Carries What the Psyche Cannot
One of the most powerful threads in her talk was the role of the body. When the psyche is overwhelmed, the body takes over as the site of suffering. Migrants, particularly those who have experienced violence or persecution, can find themselves regressing from subject to body, reduced in the eyes of others and sometimes in their own experience, to something undifferentiated and exposed.
She invoked Robert Antelme’s account of life in a concentration camp to illustrate how sustained dehumanisation reshapes one’s relationship to one’s own physical existence. For many migrants, the body becomes a signifier of otherness. Visible difference, particularly skin colour, marks a person as someone who is perceived as not from here, even when this country is their home.
That weight is enormous. The intrapsychic burden of belonging and not belonging simultaneously, of navigating an environment that signals unwelcome, can leave a person feeling they have no stable centre.
A Trauma That Travels Across Generations
De Micco also spoke about something that I think deserves far more attention than it typically receives: the transgenerational nature of migratory trauma. The experience does not exhaust itself in one lifetime. It propagates. The fight of one generation becomes the inheritance of the next. Children carry in their bodies and psyches what could not be fully processed by their parents. What cannot be communicated is transmitted.
This reframes how we think about the children and grandchildren of migrants. Their struggles are not simply personal or individual. They are, in part, the echo of an unfinished mourning, what De Micco describes as an incessant mourning of origins that can never be definitively resolved.
What This Means for Those of Us Doing This Work
For practitioners, De Micco offers a challenging but important insight. She suggests that it is in the minds of the host population, including clinicians, therapists, and care workers, that some of the most devastating psychic burden is carried. To work with migrants and refugees is to sit with histories of violence, displacement, and shame that can be destabilising. We must pay attention to our own responses.
She calls for the therapeutic environment to function as De Micco puts it, as a facilitating space, one where a new experience in one’s own body becomes possible. Where the person can begin to be deciphered and discovered, including by themselves.
A Final Reflection
What De Micco articulates is something that policy language rarely captures: that survival is not simply a matter of physical safety. It requires being seen. It requires an environment willing to reflect something back to you that confirms your humanity and your complexity.
For those of us working alongside migrants and refugees, or simply living alongside them, that is perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves. Whose gaze are we offering, and what does it reflect?
Email: [email protected]