ABSTRACT
One of the fundamental challenges in human life is coming to terms with the ‘facts of life’ of separation, differentiation and change. The cumulative effect of these facts of life during the ‘internal migration’ from childhood to adulthood in adolescence can sometimes lead to crisis. This chapter explores the cumulative effect of internal and external migration, with reference to psychoanalytic theory, literary examples and a case presentation. It provides a case presentation of a twice weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy with an adolescent girl from South America, who had quite a troubled infancy and childhood, illustrates how the patient struggled with her own transformational process, searching for her own female identity. Adolescence as a transformational process, something readers ‘journey through’ on the one hand, and the patient's four years of transitional stay in Germany on the other, came together in this patient as a difficult challenge.
