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This article was published in Volume 12, Number 2 “Societies Under Stress” of Mind and Human Interaction. The full reference is: 
Kogan, I. (2001). Romania and its Unresolved Mourning: Those who emigrated and those who stayed behing. Mind and Human Interaction, 12: 95-106.

To cite particular passages or pages, please contact us for a hard copy of the original published version: E-mail: mind@virginia.edu; phone: 434-982-1045.

Romania and its Unresolved Mourning:
Those who emigrated and those who stayed behind

By:  Ilany Kogan, M.A.

Ilany Kogan, M.A., is a training analyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society and supervisor of the Center for Psychotherapy of the Child and Adolescent, Bucharest, Romania. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt, and of the Trauma Network, Hamburg, Germany. For the last 15 years, she has worked extensively with Holocaust survivors’ offspring. She has also worked in Germany on the topic of descendants of perpetrators, and on the impact of parents imbued with Nazi ideals and values on the development of children.

In this article, I will explore the phenomenon of delayed mourning due to migratory processes on an individual level and on a societal level. I will first describe this phenomenon as it appears in a therapeutic encounter between a Romanian immigrant patient and an analyst of the same descent. I will then examine the unresolved mourning of Romanian society, stemming from their transition from a Communist dictatorship to a new era.

An immigrant patient an an analyst of the same descent

Anna, a young doctor specializing in psychiatry, emigrated from Romania to Israel some months before she was referred to me. Having finished her medical studies in Bucharest, she was happy to find a place to specialize in psychiatry. In the first session, Anna told me that she was referred to me by the senior psychiatrist of the locked ward where she was working. The psychiatrist, a woman who had also emigrated from Romania to Israel many years ago, befriended her and tried to help Anna adjust to the new country. Anna had felt quite depressed since her immigration to Israel, and she derived strength and courage from their friendship. Lately, their discussion had revolved around the possibility of having children, since Anna had already been married for seven years. This discussion brought up a lot of sadness in Anna, who claimed that she was not fit to have children of her own. At this point, the friend suggested to Anna the possibility of therapy. Anna accepted the idea, on the condition that she would be referred to a therapist who spoke her own mother tongue. The psychiatrist then referred her to me.

Though hesitating at first about the prospect of conducting analysis in Romanian, I agreed to do it, as I am fluent in the language and have a lot of experience in conducting analyses in foreign languages. I thought that, in spite of possible difficulties, it could be an enriching experience for both of us.

Anna was a pretty woman in her early thirties. She had brown hair and brown eyes, an expressive face and feminine demeanor. Anna spoke to me in Romanian; her use of the language seemed to me to be very elaborate and beautiful.

From the beginning of therapy, using my mother tongue had a strong emotional impact on me. I felt excited and somewhat intimidated. My mastery of the Romanian language is relatively good, so I am often told. But relative to whom? I now asked myself this question while listening to Anna. Relative to a twelve-year-old child, my age when I emigrated illegally from Romania with my parents, I silently answered myself. I did not forget the language, since I spoke it at home with my parents in Israel throughout my childhood and adolescence, but I had never acquired more sophisticated Romanian in my adulthood.

I was aware that my intimidation stemmed from a very deep and personal experience, which echoed in me from our first encounters. The language represented for me a world of purely private experiences. The family legend was that I learned Romanian from my nanny, a very devoted, Christian Adventist Romanian woman, who took care of me as a child and functioned as my substitute mother.

Nothing was more distant from my professional occupation than the language of my childhood and adolescence. Was I able at all to analyze in this language, so cut off from my professional career? It became clear to me that by accepting my patient’s condition, I lost the asymmetry necessary for a therapeutic relationship (Zac de Filc, 1992). Moreover, my simple, unelaborate language put me in the position of a child, especially when confronted with the beautiful language of my “grown-up” patient. I began to wonder whether this special situation where the therapist finds herself at a linguistic disadvantage, with all its emotional implications, might have a disruptive effect on the treatment. What did I compromise by accepting, though with hesitation, the patient’s request? I asked myself. On the other hand, didn’t my patient have the right to treatment, in spite of being a new immigrant to this country and not being in good command of the language? Was it right to condemn her to silence and to a childless fate, without the right to struggle against it?

I do not presume to describe here the whole course of this long and complex analysis. I will focus upon Anna’s conflicting identity, which became even more problematic as a result of her immigration to Israel. I will then deal with the process of working through her incomplete mourning, the postponement of which became aggravated by her immigration.

From the beginning of her treatment, I was aware of Anna’s feelings of nostalgia for the country she left behind. Anna’s memories centered more around places than around people. She recalled the houses, cafes, street corners, hills, and countryside of her homeland. During her sessions, my office was filled with colors, sounds, and smells of places familiar to both of us from childhood. This made me realize why Anna wanted to talk to me in her mother tongue. She wanted to share with me her very early experiences of a place that she hoped was familiar to me from my own childhood. Anna was looking for a special kind of understanding.

The therapeutic relationship that emerged helped Anna, towards the end of the first year of analysis, to disclose to me an extremely significant secret. Anna spoke a lot about her feelings of estrangement in Israel. I could easily identify with this, remembering my own feelings of uprootedness and vulnerability as a new immigrant. The reason that Anna gave for feeling so foreign was unexpected: “I am not Jewish. I do not belong here,” she said. “Nobody knows about this; it is a secret.” I was very surprised indeed. If there is such a thing as a typical Jewish appearance, Anna had it. I had a fleeting thought that her brown hair and beautiful brown eyes would have certainly endangered her life during the Holocaust.

The story that followed revealed how Anna and her husband struggled a great deal to get out of Romania. Since the privilege of emigrating was given at that time only to Jewish people, she and her husband had searched for their Jewish origins. Anna’s husband discovered that his mother’s first husband, who was killed in a car accident before he was born, was Jewish. This fact, in addition to a heavy bribe paid to the Romanian officials, enabled the couple to obtain the fake papers necessary to be considered Jewish, and thus to immigrate to Israel.

My first gut reaction to Anna’s story was my wish to console her. “Who cares if you are Jewish or not?” I wanted to say to her. However, being aware that my impulse to deny Anna’s feelings of being a stranger probably stemmed from my own painful memories as a child in Romania, I kept quiet.

My first memory that emerged was of the complicated world of a Jewish child from a rabbinical family growing up with an Adventist nanny, who faithfully took me to Adventist Christian services on Friday afternoons (of course, without my parents’ knowledge!). I remember that I loved Jesus and his beautiful pictures and sculptures. How great was my frustration when I discovered that, being Jewish, Jesus was not our G-d! Also, growing up among Christian orthodox children I learned that we, the Jewish people, were accused of having killed Jesus and were therefore damned forever. My Hebrew name made the fact that I was a foreigner in this country obvious to everybody.

On the other hand, I remembered that coming to Israel, the country we longed for, and living among Jewish people, did not help much in alleviating my feelings of being an outsider. In the new community, children looked and behaved differently; they spoke a language totally foreign to me. It took me a long time to feel at home, and I never completely attained the feelings of belonging that I sought so much.

Based on my countertransference feelings, I asked Anna if she thought that her feelings of being a foreigner stemmed from coming to Israel. Anna reflected and said quietly: “Actually, I have felt a stranger all my life.” She added that in her neighborhood in Romania there were many German-speaking people as well as Jews, and because of that she understood both German and Yiddish. “I have always admired the Jewish people and wanted to live among them. They are clever and witty,” she said, smiling.

What a strange world, I thought to myself. As a child I wanted to belong to the Christian majority, which I presumed to be powerful, and Anna wanted to belong to the Jewish minority, which she imagined to be superior. This common childhood experience which we shared, the longing to belong to another nationality, had an impact on me as well as on the therapeutic relationship. I realized that, as children, we unconsciously longed for a happier, better-integrated family, and we projected the qualities of strength of body and mind unto each other’s ethnic group. Based on my own realization, I pointed out to Anna that she might always have wished to have a more harmonious family, and that she imagined this family to be Jewish.

Anna was able to accept this interpretation, which facilitated the further working through of the painful love-hate relationship that characterized her original family. We first elaborated upon the feelings that accompanied the loss of her parents. She told me at length of her mother’s terrible suffering and death; her mother died of brain cancer when Anna was 21. Anna and her older sister lived with their mother, who devoted her life to the care of her daughters. Her parents had divorced when she was around 12 years old. Anna had witnessed many violent quarrels between her parents, and she always had the feeling that she had to protect her mother from her brutal father. She remembered the bitter day when her father left home and moved to the big city. He was a well-known musician and had many women friends. Her poor mother worked for many hours each day as a cashier at a store and was barely able to support her children. Her dream was that her daughters should study, and Anna, the brilliant medical student, fulfilled her mother’s dream. Anna was very attached to her mother, and she did everything she could to make her happy.

When she was an adolescent, she sometimes visited her father. Anna liked him; he was very charming and seductive. He took her to concerts where he presented her as his young mistress and invited her to restaurants with his friends. After a while, her father became more and more depressed. He became an alcoholic and left his work at the orchestra. Two years after her mother’s death, he was found dead in his apartment, probably as a result of alcohol and pills.

During the year of her mother’s illness, Anna took care of her all the time. Though trying hard to study as well, she was unable to concentrate. Her mother died, and Anna failed her final exams.

Anna left home after her mother’s death and moved to the big city. Her sister was already married with children. Anna felt completely abandoned and could never mourn for her mother or, later, for her father. She had an unhappy affair with a man she did not love followed by an abortion. Anna was depressed, unable to continue her studies, or find work.

In the midst of this chaotic, fragmented life, she regained control of her faculties and decided to re-register at the university to retake the courses she had failed. There she met a young man, her future husband, who gave her a lot of love and support. The relationship had parental aspects that Anna very much needed. She loved her husband, and they decided together to immigrate to Israel to build a new life.

Anna’s maternal grandmother, who lived in Romania, died during the analysis, putting Anna in touch with a lot of grief and pain. Working through this powerful outburst of mourning in analysis made Anna aware that she had never actually mourned her parents. Anna expressed her wish to visit the graves of her parents, as well as that of her grandmother, to whom she was very attached. I felt that Anna had to go back to her country of origin in order to complete her work of mourning. She had to mourn the lost, beloved ones, as well as the parts of her own self that remained there. She longed to see the color of the trees, the familiar streets and houses, and her childhood home. Anna also wanted to visit her sister and her family, to take them some presents from Israel, and to bring back some of the personal belongings that she had left there. In analysis, I felt that Anna was asking me to give her the courage and support to realize her visit.

When she returned to analysis, three weeks later, Anna looked different. The masked depression that accompanied her before was gone, and it had given way to the statement of loss and pain. During this period, we were able to work through her love and longing for her mother, as well as her anger at being abandoned by her when she was so young and helpless. We discovered that behind the bitterness towards her abandoning father were feelings of pity and sorrow as well as love and admiration.

Much psychic work was needed for the completion of her work of mourning. The elaboration on the visit to her parents’ graves, its emotional meaning, and the separation from her parents preoccupied us for a whole year. At the end of this year, Anna came to her session smiling and asked me if I was ready for a surprise. Radiant with happiness, she broke the good news: “I am pregnant,” she said, “and it happened in one month.”

Anna was elated, and I rejoiced in her happiness. I accompanied her through her pregnancy, which included all the normal anxieties and expectations of a young mother. Knowing that she would have a boy, she raised the question of circumcision. In the end, she made her decision: “I want my boy to be circumcised. He lives in this country, and he will be like everybody else.” Her husband held the same opinion.

When her analysis ended some months later, Anna promised to come see me in the future. She indeed came to see me two years later with a most adorable toddler. She had finished her specialization, had begun working as a psychiatrist, and the family’s economic situation had improved. She had recently heard from some colleagues that I was planning to go to Bucharest for work and was very excited about that. “I would like so much to go with you, to take you around, to help you there,” she said. “You helped me to go back and find myself. You gave me a lot and I would like to reciprocate,” she added in her beautiful, elaborate Romanian.

In the autumn of that year, I went to Romania for a professional visit, 36 years after I left the country. A colleague met me at the airport and, at my request, we went directly to look for my childhood home. In the neighborhood that was so familiar to me, I easily found my way around. I looked at the houses, churches, and streets that were imprinted upon my memory and walked as if in a dream.

When I arrived at the square where my parents’ house was supposed to be, I was struck by the strange view that unfolded in front of my eyes: the left-hand side of the square looked the same as I remembered it, but the right-hand side, where our house once stood, had changed completely. Stunned, I stood in front of the square, asking myself over and over again, ‘’But where is the house? Where is it?” My colleague, who had already warned me that parts of Bucharest had completely disappeared during the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, patiently explained to me what I already knew. Ceausescu, the former Romanian dictator, had destroyed whole neighborhoods; beautiful and historically valued buildings and churches that gave the city its very special character had been torn down indiscriminately. In their place, architectural monsters had been erected, their ugly grandiosity reminding one of the Fascist era, as well as of Ceausescu’s megalomanic wishes, his ruthlessness, and his oppression.

The same traumatic experience awaited me when I attempted to find my grandparents’ house. The house, which also functioned as a synagogue in the Jewish community and in which I lived until the age of 4, held some of my earliest memories. I still remember the sun shining through the leaves of the tree in the big yard where I played. I also remember the scroll of the Torah in the synagogue, as well as my grandmother’s big kitchen where, as a young child, I enjoyed cooking with her. This house was the “container” of my feelings of warmth and love, and the memories connected to it had functioned as a source of strength and courage through difficult moments in my life.

After looking for some time, I realized that both my parents’ and grandparents’ houses had vanished into thin air. Feelings of anger overwhelmed me. After working them through, they gave way to feelings of sorrow. I felt as if the houses were parts of my self that were irretrievably lost. I became aware that, though I have done much work of mourning throughout my life, it was far from being completed. Working through my mourning, I often remembered Anna, my first Romanian patient. I could clearly see the impact of the treatment upon both of us. Not only did I help Anna in the search for her self, but, by assisting her on her journey back to her home country, I also became better prepared for the visit back to my birthplace. Thus, Anna’s wish to accompany me during my journey back to our home country was, in fantasy at least, realized.

Those who stayed behind

This year my book The Cry of Mute Children, which deals with the understanding and treatment of second-generation Holocaust survivors, appeared in its Romanian version, published by Editura Trei (Kogan, 2001). The main themes of the book are, first, the transmission of trauma from one generation to another and, second, the creation of hope and the reconstruction of the self-image. Because of these two themes, I feel that it is relevant to Romanian society and to all those whose lives have been touched by the reality of war, violence, and trauma. The Romanian people have suffered the trauma of being under a dictatorship that ruled through terror and violence. Not only have they lived a life of sheer misery, but they have also been humiliated and infantilized. Through my encounters with people, I have found that the Romanians show a lack of self-assurance, a derogatory attitude towards themselves, and a lack of belief in their ability to create a better future. The many years of oppression and terror have left a deep imprint on their psychic make-up.

During the past few years I have taken an active part in setting up the Center of Psychotherapy for the Child and Adolescent in Bucharest, the first of its kind in Romania. I would like first to describe the birth of this Center. On one of my visits to Romania to work with Romanian therapists, a colleague, Vera Sandor, picked me up from the airport. It was December, the trees were covered with a heavy blanket of snow, and on the ground was a thin layer of ice, which I was told was very slippery and dangerous. During our trip from the airport, I was deep in thought, looking at the beautiful designs that the snowflakes made on the windscreen, designs which reminded me of scenes from my childhood. At a traffic light, a small dark figure banged on our window. Startled, I asked Vera, “What is this?” “A street child,” she replied calmly. Then she went on to tell me more about the life of street children, a topic which I had previously only known through Western literature on Romania.

The traffic light changed, and we drove off. For a long time after, however, the face of that little child haunted me.

It was during this visit that Vera talked about her dream of setting up the Center of Psychotherapy for the Child and Adolescent in Romania. “There are houses for street children, but they usually run away from them. We should find better ways to deal with that, but it is also vital that we prevent others from becoming street children. As you know, there are lots of families in Romania with problematic children who are not on the streets, and for these children there is no solution,” she said. This is very true, I thought, and wondered what was happening to those children who do have families, food and clothing, but who are also suffering from psychic problems. Their future is grim, and they may end up becoming thieves, criminals, psychotics, or drug addicts. Shouldn’t we use our knowledge and experience to avoid such catastrophes that may affect their lives and the shape of society as a whole?

Leaving Romania to work in Hamburg with my colleague and friend, Professor Peter Riedesser, I shared with him the dream of setting up such a center in Bucharest. A man of vision, Peter joined the enterprise wholeheartedly.

I will not go into the details of the long journey we both made to realize this dream. It is enough to say that after all the difficulties and disappointments we encountered along the way, there were people who had faith in our work and intentions, and who helped us to set up the center in Bucharest.

During my many visits to Romania, I supervised the work of the staff as well as the center’s activities and goals, and I learned about the ways Romanian society has reacted to the abrupt change from a totalitarian Communist regime to the Western lifestyle. Discussions with friends, colleagues, and students showed me that general feelings toward the totalitarian regime were ones of disappointment, hatred, and impotence. In spite of this, Romanians still felt some yearning for the past. This phenomenon is frequently found in many countries that have become westernized. What is unique about Romanian society is that it suffers from a state of unresolved mourning for a dictator whom they themselves eliminated. Let us here examine the phenomenon of longing for the past from various angles.

First, as they entered a new era, the Romanians were forced to evaluate old principles and adapt to different values. They were shown promising opportunities that came with alien, burdensome requirements. They had to abruptly exchange the rituals and teachings of a familiar culture for a new, unfamiliar situation (Kahn, 1997).

In addition, the Communist totalitarian regime had stifled initiative for private enterprise as well as the motivation needed to achieve a higher standard of work and life. The state provided for the people a secure salary, albeit very low, independent of the results of their work. There was equality in this situation, since a miserable, poor life was the fate of almost everybody. Basic needs, such as health and education, were taken care of by the state. This infantilized people, however, making them unable to take responsibility for their own lives.

The new era also created turmoil in people’s lives. Despite the promise of freedom and opportunity, the immediate reality required skills that had not been developed for a long time and a mobilization of forces to which they were unaccustomed. Romanians also experienced narcissistic hurt when they compared their lives to life in the West and other Westernized countries of Eastern Europe; this was accompanied by feelings of shame and humiliation. In comparison with the West, Romanians’ housing and attire took on a shabbiness that they regarded with the shame of the newly poor. They, at least most of them, still considered themselves incapable of coping in the competitive marketplace; they were embarrassed by their inexperience in carrying out the complex practices fundamental to the democratic process.

As a result of these changes, Romanians have come to feel the humiliation of the breadwinner’s vocational worthlessness in the workplace and resultant loss of status inside his family. The purchasing power of their savings and their modest pensions have become insignificant. From my encounters with the group that founded the center, I learned that Romanians looked upon the West with awe and suspicion. When I pointed out to them the efforts made in the West to help them construct the center, they asked fearfully, “Why do they want to do this for us?” I then realized that one of my first functions was to be a bridge to the West, upon which a relationship of trust could be built in the future.

The great disparities between Romanians’ lives before and after the fall of Communism, as well as the abruptness of the change, left people yearning for what they left behind. In this new situation, which had uncomfortable and painful aspects, many felt nostalgic for the past ideals and even dared to express secretly their longing for the lost dictator. The corruption, betrayal, and terrorization by the former Communist government were partially experienced as if an idealized parent had been exposed as corrupt or inhuman. The experience of loss of the old culture became intensified and was accompanied by anxiety, hostility, and a “sense of discontinuity of identity” (Garza-Guerrero, 1974). The intensified destruction of former identifications, as well as the loss of the accustomed life, brought with it depression and feelings of loneliness. The prolonged despair was due in great part to the difficulty in working through processes of mourning.

Freud (1917) defined mourning as “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal and so on” (p. 243). For an individual, mourning is an obligatory psychobiological process. In normal situations, if someone dies, we have to do a lot of work to let that person die psychologically. Without going through the work of mourning, we cannot genuinely accept the reality that something is lost. And if the lost person is needed for our psychological well-being, or if they form a part of our own ego-ideal (Joffe and Sandler, 1965; Sandler, Holder and Meers, 1987), we may slip into a state of pathological mourning.

Romanian society is marked and characterized by the unresolved mourning over the removal of their dreadful leader, Nicolae Ceausescu. Volkan (1998) convincingly bases his analysis of the relationship between Romanians and their dictator on Freud’s (1913) psychoanalytic understanding of primitive man. Volkan claims that although the Romanians killed Ceausescu, they allowed him to live on in many ways—most importantly, through the actions and policies that followed his death. Their pathological mourning was expressed through the fact that they never eliminated the image of the leader (the father figure) but kept it alive through their hatred as well as their nostalgia.

Romanians rejoiced over the removal of their dreadful leader, but after the initial excitement, most eventually felt that little had changed. Many considered the National Salvation Front (NSF) merely an anti-Ceausescu faction within the Romanian Communist Party and saw the new regime as simply a replacement of one group of communists with another.

Romanians never fully realized that, though the reign of Nicolae Ceausescu ended, his “sons” not only “murdered” him but also kept him alive. Having ruled Romanians for two decades, Ceausescu had become a part of them. With his death, a part of each Romanian also died (Grinberg, 1964), but their shame of being associated with him and their hidden guilt for “killing” him had to be denied. However, through their identification with him they also kept the dictator alive.

In June 1990, nationalists launched a weekly publication called “Romania Mare” (Great Romania), a reference to the traditional rallying cry of Romanian nationalists for centuries before Ceausescu came to power. The paper, which acquired the largest circulation of any Romanian weekly newspaper, succeeded in keeping Ceausescu “alive” through an undisguised nostalgia for his regime. The head of this weekly publication, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, became, in the year 2000, the head of the greatest party in opposition to the present regime, almost endangering its existence. The party received a large number of votes, promising to “purify” Romania of the gypsy population, the Hungarian minority, and of the Mafia, while emphasizing Romanian nationalism. Despite the fact that the NSF was reelected, the rejection of democracy by many Romanians and the longing for the past dictatorship became quite clear. By identification with the aggressor, the Romanians internalized the image of the dreaded leader and made it part of themselves (Volkan, 1998).

Discussion

In my discussion I would like to focus first on the impact that emigration had on the sense of identity and processes of mourning of the patient described above. I will then briefly connect these processes to mourning processes on a societal level.

The capacity to maintain a sense of consolidated identity (sameness amid change) was first noted by Erikson (1950, 1956). Most recently, Stern (1985), through his concept of “self-history” (i.e., a sense of continuation with one’s subjective past) refers to this very capacity. In trying to clarify the concept of identity, Akhtar (1999) has noted that individuals with a solid identity retain genuine ties with their past while comfortably locating themselves in their current reality.

The identity change that results from migration from one country to another differs from these normative phenomena. A profound psychic flux results from the drastic alteration of external reality. Loss of familiar landscape, music, food, language, and customs mobilizes pain and mourning (Grinberg and Grinberg, 1989). Such mourning and “culture-shock” (Garza-Guerrero, 1974) cause a destabilization of identity that takes considerable time and intrapsychic work to settle and restabilize. However, in instances where the pre-emigration character structure is problematic, where the intrapsychic separateness did not exist before emigration, the consolidation of identity may be even more hindered.

In the case of Anna described above, the patient came to treatment with conflicts that had already afflicted her sense of identity. As a child, her ethnic or national self-representation was laden with shame, and she idealized the Jewish identity. When she became an immigrant, she felt vulnerable like a child, and her devaluation of her country of origin as well as of her own self was reinforced. Much psychic work was needed to change this devaluating attitude, which stemmed from early traumatic experiences as well as from her incomplete work of mourning.

Anna has suffered not only the loss of her mother and father; by emigrating she has also lost the support she had drawn from the familiar climate and landscape, unconsciously perceived as an extension of the mother. The wish to return for a visit to the home country that emerged in analysis was very much linked to her longing for lost primary objects, as well as the need to give them up and build a life of her own. Revisiting her parents’ grave helped her achieve this aim and held for her great psychic significance (Akhtar and Smolar, 1998). By carrying gifts to relatives left behind and by bringing some personal belongings back with her to her new home, Anna made the first attempts at separation, like a toddler in the rapprochement phase.

Before she was in analysis, Anna’s primary objects, as well as the familiar places, were not given up through the work of mourning nor assimilated in the ego through identification. This resulted in a temporal “fracture of the psyche” (Akhtar, 1999). One of the aims of her analysis was to help her put together the different fragments of her psyche, as well as the various “pieces of her life” (Pfeiffer, 1974). The “holding relationship” (Kogan, 1995; 1996; 1998c; 2001) in analysis helped her mobilize forces and go back and face the “mental pain” (Freud, 1926) incurred in the acknowledgement of her losses. This dynamic shift helped Anna to continue her work of mourning in analysis.

Working through feelings of idealization and anger towards her lost objects made meaningful living more possible. This helped her move from a devalued self-representation to an emerging new self-representation, as a resident of her “adopted” country. The search into the past and the attempt to complete the work of mourning facilitated the creation of a sense of future that, in this case, was expressed through the creation of a child.

The “sonorous wrapping” (Anzieu, 1976) of our native language had an impact on Anna, as well as on myself. It connected us both to the early maternal image and to early childhood experiences. For both of us, migration had caused a ruptured self-experience, which was mended by the emotional refueling of revisiting the native country. From this point of view, we both emerged from this analysis with a better integrated self.

Regarding the societal level, I would like to point out that the temporal “fracture of the psyche,” due to the incomplete work of mourning that we saw in both the immigrant patient and her analyst, is a phenomenon that characterizes the Romanian society as a whole. The pathological mourning for old values and for the image of the lost dictator enhances the difficulty of the Romanian society to integrate new attitudes and values of the new era.

Similarly to my patient and myself, the efforts of my Romanian colleagues to accompany me on the journey back to my childhood can also be seen as their willingness to search for their own past in order to complete their own work of mourning.

One of the further tasks of Romanian society is to mourn and identify selectively with aspects of both the old and the new culture in order to create a new life. This is something that Romanians, collectively, have still to achieve.

References

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