Trauma and Migration: A Transactional Analytic Approach toward Refugees and Torture Victims

This article presents a model for interpreting migration, a phenomenon that involves the relocation of a large group of people from their homeland and native culture to another place, an event that is usually experienced as traumatic. The author describes factors of resilience and vulnerability that affect the psychic health of immigrants and, in particular, the effects that these have on refugee populations. Due to the events that determined their migration, refugees are particularly at risk for psychotraumatological pathologies, and migration can have a retraumatizing effect. The specific psychopathological problems of traumatized refugees-in particular, those who have survived torture-are described from a transactional analytic perspective along with indications for the psychosocial management of their difficulties.