Psychic pain as a result of disrupted narcissistic fantasies among Japanese immigrants: A self-psychological study of the stress and trauma of immigrating

Abstract

This representative case study investigates three Japanese immigrants’ unconscious narcissistic fantasies. Unlike traditional psychoanalytic research on immigration, which views the central factor of psychological distresses arising from immigrating as object loss, mourning work, and identity re-formation, this study finds that the essential factor of an immigrant's psychological distress is the injury to the narcissistic fantasy. An immigrant arriving in a new country hopes that his or her central organizing fantasy will be realized immediately, concretely, and positively, and an immigrant dreads experiencing his or her central organizing fantasy as valueless or illegitimate in the new country. The disruption of the fantasy can be experienced in an immigrant as a sense of betrayal by both the old and the new country, which, together, represent the whole world. The author argues that, for an immigrant patient, entering into psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy is experienced as a kind of re-immigration.