ABSTRACT
This chapter will be a meditation and reflection on twin themes. First, the contingent relationship between personhood/identity and place: I am using the word ‘place’ here to denote a background of meaning and meaningful containment, and am therefore referring to both an internal experience of feeling emplaced (located or embedded in an internal environment) and an external experience of feeling ‘in place’ (as belonging in or to a particular locale or external environment). While I recognize the imposition of such an artificial dualism, it is useful to enable thinking and reflection about what is always in the background but is not so often brought into the foreground of psychoanalytic thinking. That is, the environment – the wider frame within which any therapeutic relationship and indeed any relationship (interpersonal, intercultural) manifests. And here I am including both physical environment and cultural history. The second theme is that of the primacy of the psychological function of the link and the capacity to dream, to imagine, to ‘make’, and therefore tell a story about oneself, about one’s country and culture and one’s place in it. Linking these two themes are the contemporary experiences of early trauma and traumatic migration written out of a postcolonial cultural context, specifically that of Australia, a country whose sense of identity is founded upon cumulative waves of migration, traumatic dislocation and alienation and the appropriation and dispossession of the lands, languages and therefore identities of our indigenous first peoples.
