An Ethnopsychotherapeutic Approach to Unaccompanied Minor Asylum Seekers: Navigating Between Culture, Body and Words

ABSTRACT

In recent years, many Unaccompanied Minor Refugees have arrived in our “Western” countries. They all face numerous health risk factors, particularly in terms of mental health: separation from or loss of parents, trauma, exile, and immersion in an unfamiliar environment, all of this as a minor. However, their distress is often overlooked or underestimated. Particularly, the psychological impact of being separated from familiar adults, as well as from their cultural environment of reference, is rarely taken into account in the care they receive. Paradoxically, and likely as a result, the extent of their suffering very rarely leads to psychotherapy. It is as if the psychoanalyst's encounter with a culturally‐different, further burden by heavy trauma patient, stirs up both the familiar and the unfamiliar. On the one hand, as a human being the patient functions, consciously and unconsciously, in a similar way to the analyst, and hence is recognizable. On the other hand, differences between them linked to their cultural backgrounds or to the extreme trauma effects, bring in the unfamiliar. For instance, material may emerge that is repressed in the culture of one but given open expression in that of the other, bringing the return of the repressed and the uncanny. Collective fantasies in the analyst about the patient's culture, including unconscious stereotypes, may also be present and impact the transference and countertransference dynamic.