3rd LATAM prize for Cartagena: Marco Rodiz "Emigrating as a foreigner of oneself"

Every migratory process will have an implicit link, a relationship between what is left and what is expected to be found. Well, from the very moment of birth, as one leaves the womb – let us consider it as the place where everything is safe and full, completely satisfactory – we know that it is not always like that, but let us try for the moment to stay with this image. Abandoning that womb for whatever reason and circumstances, implies a renunciation and therefore, the expectation of being able to find something that brings us closer to that place where we were, to find ourselves again with the possibility of seeing the lost omnipotence satisfied and avoid feeling the narcissistic wound of not being in fullness.

Emigrating will never be the same as fleeing. These are two completely different contexts and experiences, perhaps from our Latin American perspective, we know about the differences. But from the psychoanalytical point of view, facing the renunciation of the motherland also implies to encounter our bonds. Bion said and I quote: “Knowledge has no meaning unless someone knows about something, and this is the statement of a relationship…“. Here arises the relationship already known to us of content – continent, and a type of bond that Bion called the commensal type, in which two come to share a third and from which each of the parties can benefit. It is a scenario in which contents and emotional experiences add up and become more and more robust and complete, as a process that, in the long run, would represent the possibility of promoting the growth of the mental apparatus and therefore, the possibility of Learning from Experience. The person who manages to do this, who can retain his experiences and knowledge, who can use his past experiences and be receptive to new ones, will have the wind in his back.

On the other hand, the one in which the relation content – continent is less favorable – (Content, Continent), a relation that would then be dominated by envy, will end up giving way to a -K, which Bion called a nameless terror. That is to say, that the breast is not only unable to mitigate pain, but also eliminates the desire to live.

The experience of emigrating serves as a stage for the unconscious desire to return to the mother, to that mother who is the repository of the experience of everything and of nothingness at the same time. I will allow myself to add here a literary reference that I find interesting to share. The work of Albert Camus, The Stranger, which was published in 1942 and shows us its protagonist as a completely strange man, a man bordering on the absurd, who perceives the world devoid of all meaning, who does not question, who remains passive to everything that happens around him. Meursault, the protagonist, a man indolent of his own existence, oblivious, a stranger to life and to his own life, who does not seek the slightest sense nor meaning. In fact, while reading the book, we are impregnated with his indifference and he generates a feeling of rejection in us because of the way he relates to the world. The book begins, and I quote: “Today mom died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. I received a telegram from the asylum: “Mother deceased. Burial tomorrow. Condolences. It doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”

I will comment here on the etymology of the word foreigner, as it will allow me to explain my reference to this literary work. Foreigner is derived from the Old French, “etranger” meaning stranger and from the Latin extraneus. Camus, here presents us with a character with whom we find it difficult to empathize, difficult to understand, surprising us with how alien his own existence can be to him. As a curious fact, the author introduced this book with a small phrase that I think is very relevant to comment on here: “In our society, a man who does not cry at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death“. In fact, Meursault (the protagonist in this book) ends up being judged not for the crime committed, but for not adapting to what society considers correct, not having mourned his mother as the rest would expect. He is judged for his personality, not for his crime.

Before tragedy knocked at the doors of this protagonist, when he was offered a promotion in his job and even to work from Paris (to emigrate), his answer was without any enthusiasm, “yes, but … you never change your life, that in any case they were all worth the same and that I didn’t dislike mine here at all“.

I will share with you a clinical experience of a treatment that has taken about 5 years, of which only the first year was developed, in person in Venezuela (where I live) and the following years, online from the different countries through which my patient has traveled. This patient, whom I will call G and who is currently 30 years old, studied in an important school in Caracas, has a perfect command of 4 languages, has traveled more than 12 countries since she was 18 years old, studied at university in France, and graduated as a psychologist. She has never practiced psychology, at least not from a clinical point of view. Her interest has been focused on advertising and marketing, at least during the beginning of the treatment. Then she decided to carry out her childhood project, to emigrate to Spain, because she also has Spanish nationality.

G considers her parents to be “functional idiots”, very successful in the fields in which they work, but the worst thing they could have done in their lives was to have children. Both she and her brother end up as “human waste”, in the absence of emotional experience of any kind. She thinks that she studied psychology when in reality she needed a psychologist to help her. She established romantic relationships in which she was physically and verbally abused, and even if she had broken fingers and black eyes, she felt that at least her partners made her see her hatred, which after all was an emotion, a feeling. She is bisexual, doesn’t believe she can have a partner, much less hopes to have children. She now has a cat he named Joker, after a Joaquin Phoenix movie.

Since having arrived in Spain, G has never been short of jobs, she worked in the technological area, with world renowned companies. She was part of different work groups, in specific tasks, which involve meetings with people of different nationalities and therefore, with different languages. However she never felt comfortable or satisfied with what she had achieved, with what she earned, nor with the space she lived in. On a vacation trip to Malaysia, she decided that she would study web design and dedicate herself to it. When got her first job in the field, this didn’t work out well either. She established a new relationship with a man, whom she tried to help out of his depression, but who never offered her the opportunity to feel loved, to feel that her affection was received and considered.

G decided to emigrate again, this time to France, and immediately got a job with another well-known technology company. She could not tolerate the places where she was mistreated by her ex-partner, while she was studying psychology at university. She is currently in Ireland, with another highly recognized company of the same kind. She hates the cold, she hates the heat, she hates the place where she lives and which she shares with other co-workers. She can’t stand her landlord whom she describes as a hoarder, obsessive compulsive and depressive. She seems to enjoy her new job, but… because she does not have social security yet – while she is waiting for the corresponding procedures to be completed 1000 euros have been withdrawn from her salary as a guarantee and will be returned to her – she feels robbed by this new country.
She has established a new relationship of a casual type, with a co-worker whom she knows is only there because he reminds her of what it is like to be depressed, because she wants to help him. At the same time, she has a casual relationship with a woman, because it makes her feel cared for by a mother. All this while she remembers an ex-boyfriend, probably the only one with whom she has had a healthy relationship, but which she could not enjoy, because she felt he treated her too well, much better than she deserved. Today she regrets it. She tells me that once she asked him why was he so generous, how did he face adversities, to dream, to have expectations and fears at the same time, and he answered with a question, “did your parents love you”. She then cried, as she had never felt loved by her parents. The only affective relationship in which she feels she can be genuine without fear of being marginalized is with me in therapy. She wonders if she would be different if I were her parent. G keeps running from one country to another, in search of what she lost and never had, trying to ignore her lack, which also belongs to her, she is starting to build a symbol that will allow her to keep her experiences. In the meantime, she keeps migrating in search of what she does not know how to have.

Freud in a 1916 work entitled Various Types of Character Discovered in Analytical Work, details a particular type he called “Those who fail when they succeed“, these are the ones who become ill not because of deprivation, but rather when they see a deeply valued desire fulfilled, as if they could not tolerate happiness. In them the illness arises when the desire is fulfilled, when they are successful. In the same work he quotes from Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth: “Nothing is gained, and all is lost when a wish is fulfilled without complete satisfaction. It is better to be the victim than to live with its death in a joy full of restlessness“.

I think of the difficulty of facing what marginalizes us, of feeling exiled from life itself, alienated from everything, without a space to belong to. This scenario makes us face, as Benedetti said, “desexile”, which will not be a state, but rather a process, a journey to find ourselves again and reach the possibility of retaking societal life, to free ourselves from the condition of subhuman. In the words of Marcelo Viñar (2017), “To feel again belonging to the human species and reconciled with it, with ambivalences, gratitudes and resentments comparable to those of any neighbour’s son”.

Meanwhile the analytical work continues, G suffers because if the bus that would take her home does not pick her up according to schedule and arrives late as usual, she will have no alternative but to have the session with me on the bus, using the Wifi of the bus, which because of how “deficient” it is makes her feel that she is still in Venezuela.