Organized violence against individuals leads to a breaking point in their lives. Among other traumas, it results from exposure to death fears, an inability to use culturally acquired coping and grief reactions, a loss of meaning (loss of individuality in the face of annihilation), numbed and constricted personalities, fixation on an unfinished past, and severed bonds with common heritage (Dasberg 1986). In the last two decades, Latin Americans have experienced organized violence brought about by dictatorship and civil war. As a result, a large segment of the Latin American population has been forced into exile. Life outside the homeland is typically preceded by life-threatening experiences involving the individual, the immediate family, the group of reference, and society at large. The individual goes into exile with a core sense of culture and linguistic identity, as well as a background of personal experiences. These will be retained through a series of extreme traumatic experiences and through asylum-seeking and resettlement, with all the massive and nodanticipated violent losses this entails. The abrupt uprooting is often followed by an alienating encounter with an unknown culture and language (Freire 1989; 1993). In exile, the individual faces tasks which offer possibilities of continuity versus discontinuity, similarities versus differences, acceptance versus rejection, resistance versus adaptability, and integration versus lack of integration. Given the abrupt, violent, and forced nature of refugee experiences and the short period of time in which these experiences are encountered, the individual needs to make drastic intrapsychic accommodations. As a mechanism for coping and survival, the individual initially attempts to transfer, duplicate, or rescue any aspect of the old life and the old that may permit a continuity of self-identity, thereby reinforcing his/her cultural and linguistic core (Freire 1990a, 1990b, 1991). In order to move toward a self, incorporating elements of the language and culture, the individual needs to find and meaningful life commitments in an environment that is perceived as being receptive and appreciative of what s/ he has to offer, while also providing opportunities for the newcomer. An individual will constantly compare the old (who s/he was, what s/he had, what s/he knew) with the (who s/he is, what s/he has, what s/he knows). For a healthy integration with the least possible conflict, the individualneeds tobe left with apositive balance when making this comparison (Freire 1993a; 1993b). The sum of the refugee experiences acts to disassemble the individual's intra-psychic structure, leading to a state of psycho-emotional disorganization that tests the sense of identity to its utmost. Ideally, individuals will, with time, find some partial resolution for their experiences at personal and collective levels. Those who manage particularly well achieve the restructuring of a core sense of identity, with some degree of healthy resolution, through a balanced, bicultural, and bilingual new self constructed from the remains of a traumatized monocultural/monolingual (Freire 1989; 1991; 1993; 1993a; 1993b). well as clinical and research work performed in this community during the last two decades, I have identified gender-differentiated patterns of responses and outcomes of Latin Americans living in exile. Though this work is based specifically on experience with the Latin American refugee population in Toronto, consultation with colleagues working with Latin Americans exiled in other cities in Canada and in other parts of the world suggests that these findings and observations are not unique to Toronto, nor to Canada (Carli 1991). Psychiatric services that I offered to refugees of other ethnic groups in Toronto also seem to indicate a similarity of findings and insights when comparing the experiences of women and men. However, this is a qualitative study that needs to be validated in a hypothesis-testing investigation. The thesis of this study is that, from a psychodynamic perspective, given comparable time in a country and similar post-resettlement experiences, gender seems to protect women better than men. Latin American refugee women, in general, tend to respond better than their male counterparts to the prolonged identity crisis and other crises inherent in the process of exile, from the following perspectives: a) continuity of meaningful vital tasks; b) securing meaningful vital tasks; c) coping mechanisms and adjustment strategies; and d) restructuring of a bicultural/bilingual self, thereby facilitating adaptation to and integration in the country.