ABSTRACT
Hollander elaborates the challenges suffered by populations when they must flee their countries of origin, offering a psychological anatomy of the different stages of loss and adaptation, fear and anticipation, resistance to and embrace of a new life and identity far from home. Through the unique travails of four of our psychoanalytic protagonists, we learn about their varied experiences as they employ their psychological acumen to manage the destabilizing impact of forced exile. Through Marie Langer’s exile in Mexico, Hollander highlights how the exile is psychologically destabilizing but also represents the possibility of achieving unanticipated new meanings in life. Langer’s exile presented her with the opportunity to become the co-director of The Internationalist Team of Mental Health Workers Mexico-Nicaragua and to design and implement the Nicaraguan revolutionary government’s national mental health system, the first in the Central American nation’s history. Hollander describes her trip to Nicaragua with Langer to witness this unique psychoanalytically informed project, and she imparts moving details about history’s only experience in which the Freud/Marx dialogue was actualized in practice through the unique collaboration between progressive psychoanalysts and a leftist government in the construction of a free and quality mental health care system accessible to the entire population. The diverse challenges of exile are also taken up through Hollander’s depiction of Marcelo and Maren Viñars’ professional and personal experience in France and Juan Carlos Volnovich’s in Cuba. As all three return to their countries following the resumption of constitutional rule, Hollander analyzes the contradictory experience of “going home.”
