ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how a major environmental change lacerates the structures, threatens the safety feeling that all human beings need, and therefore becomes traumatic. It describes the mind's restitutive efforts to undo the noxious impact of such trauma and presents some observations regarding the analytic treatment of individuals who have suffered from the trauma of dislocation, either children or adults. The analyst must offer empathic resonance to a trauma patient's sense of geographical dislocation. The chapter discusses the traumatic ingredients of environmental change: leaving, arriving, mourning, and becoming. Leaving a country for another, or particular region for another region in the same country, involves a disturbing loss of familiar topography. Leaving home inevitably involves leaving certain physical objects behind. As one moves away from a known physical environment, one comes across new objects, literally speaking. The analyst working with traumatically dislocated individuals must be prepared to "receive" non-human, largely environmental transferences despite their subtle and, at times, uncanny qualities.
