ABSTRACT

This chapter explores a specific phenomenon in psychotherapy with refugees. This phenomenon refers to situations when refugees in psychotherapy bring to their session/s person/s who were not invited to come and without giving in advance any notification to the therapist. To begin with, it is important to emphasize that in psychotherapy with refugees one has to be extremely flexible in order to respond appropriately to the specificity and complexity of the situation. Psychotherapists without field experience in working with people in war zones tend to overlook the fact that in the eyes of the refugees work with, the very psychotherapy situation itself appears unreal. Since refugees are defined in terms of their loss of home, it is important to delineate the psychological processes connected with this specific loss and not to resort exclusively to theories of trauma in order to understand this phenomenon.