ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what happens when the pressures of the psychosocial transition of adolescence collide with the confusion, loss, disorientation, and often traumatic elements characteristic of enforced migration. The chapter explains the work with two adolescent boys, both of whom had been thrown out of their known world by external circumstances. Their internal responses to this fact give a picture of how defensive psychic systems take shape, and how psychoanalytic psychotherapy may be able to free such adolescents from the life-destroying aspects of their survival strategies. The two boys suffered different kinds of loss of home. The first was an asylum-seeking refugee from former Yugoslavia who had arrived in the United Kingdom (UK) together with his family after a traumatic flight from communal violence. The second was abandoned on the steps of social services by his mother at age eight and has lived in long-term foster care since then.
