ABSTRACT
Displacement functions as a defence commonplace in clinical analysis; in a phobia, for example, displacement onto the phobic object permits the objectification, localization, and containment of anxiety. The geographer Anssi Paasi suggests that places represent the nodes of a life biography, which is a unique web of situated life episodes. In this sense, person-place interactions include the perspective of an individual's whole lifetime, which comprises memory, transgenerational patterns, and historically remote events. The American Community researcher M. T. Fullilove describes displacement as disrupting three psychological processes: familiarity, attachment, and identity. Analysis of a patient for who place had no psychic reality disclosed difficulties in thinking metaphorically. These prevented the communication of symbols as words and caused an impasse in analysis. An explanation for this predicament is that metaphor-making requires imagery ultimately derived from an actual place. Thus, dislocating processes working against the discovery of place compromise symbolic thought.
