ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some ongoing clinical work with a mother and her infant that highlights the complexity of this intergenerational, across-time-and-place phenomenon of home and its meanings and which forms the basis of how migration from any perspective is experienced. This mother is amongst millions all over the world who suffer the experience of enforced migration because of political persecution. This is only one kind of external migration but perhaps the one that is most often associated with violence, helplessness, trauma. This kind of migration has usually happened in circumstances of sudden rupture following a period, sometimes of some length, of fear and persecution where the social bonds of community have been attacked through random and targeted acts of violence. After arriving in the new country, the ability to work through the vicissitudes of pre-migratory and migratory trauma is connected with the internal strengths of the individual concerned, themselves predicated upon sufficient good experiences in their history.
