Psychodynamic psychology was developed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his followers as the systematic study of the psychological forces underlying human behavior, feelings, and emotions, paying special attention to how conscious and unconscious motivations govern the person's decisions and actions. Seen under this particular paradigm, the course of human life can be understood metaphorically as a succession of migrations in which the individual moves away from the early figures of childhood to form new attachments. The journey of separations continues throughout life, and every migration involves loss, moving on, and forming of new attachments, so mourning is always involved. Migrating to a new land and leaving one's home country typically activates a mourning process, forcing the immigrant to undergo a laborious, psychological-transformative process that will affect the individual's identity and sever the emotional attachments to the person's prior human and non-human environment, such as the country of origin's climate and geography. Exile is understood as a particular type of forced migration, involving banishment and out-casting, in which there is often no possibility of return. So, from a psychodynamic perspective, exile is considered as a form of traumatic-involuntary migration in which the individual must mobilize additional adaptive mechanisms to deal not only with the intrinsic losses of migration but also with the added trauma of exile. This essay will present an overview of the various psychological mechanisms and the possible compromises and outcomes involved in the adaptation to exile, illustrated by clinical case examples from the psychotherapy with exile patients.
