ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the impact of bereavement in the context of the multiple traumas of exile. The experience of exile itself has been characterised as one of multiple bereavement in terms of loss of country, status, activity, cultural reference points, social networks, and of family. The difficulty of achieving deferred hopes and expectations in exile leads to demoralisation. In the case of children in exile, the parents or surviving parent may exclude for them the possibility of mourning by denial of the event in an attempt to shield the child from the reality. In terms of the internal world, severely traumatised individuals experience a diminution of psychic space as a result of the experienced failure of external reality to provide adequate containment of projections, a phenomenon described by A. Reyes. The difficulties of writing about, or clinically working with, bereavement in traumatised people reflects the dilemma with which they themselves are faced.
