Suitcase children: abandoned, transported, reunited with strangers who claimed to be parents. The trauma began when they crossed without you.
Suitcase children.
They were called "suitcase children"—creatures transported between countries according to adult convenience. Abandoned with grandparents while their parents emigrated, reunited years later with strangers who claimed kinship. The child who lost her parents at age two does not recognize the telephone voice a year later: "Who are you?". The woman who carried her in her womb has become a stranger. Siblings are new faces. The biological family is more foreign than the foreign country.
Özbek documents the devastation: the younger the child at the moment of abandonment, the deeper the damage. Each parental visit reopens the wound; each departure confirms that attachment is dangerous. Better not to take root. These children grow up fearing connection because the original connection was betrayed. Their parents chose geography over bond. The message inscribed in the body: whoever you love, disappears. Protect yourself by not loving.
The adult analysand who was a suitcase child presents relational difficulties that precede their own migration. The trauma did not begin when they crossed the border—it began when their parents crossed without them.
Rerefences
Özbek, T. (2021). The tale of those who went forth: On the inner experience of migration and forced migration. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 91–107). Routledge.
Babel was not punishment—it was the consequence of not tolerating limits. Making home of the limit is the only possible maturity.
Making home of the limit.
The tower of Babel promised heaven—and produced dispersion. The myth warns: omnipotence is paid for with fragmentation. Whoever builds up to the clouds ends up without ground. The longing for total understanding, for a single language, for fusion without remainder, collapses into multiplied confusion. Babel is not arbitrary punishment but structural consequence: whoever cannot tolerate limits loses all ground.
Gogolin proposes a therapeutic inversion: making the limit a home rather than an obstacle to overcome. Partial understanding is not the failure of total understanding—it is the only understanding possible between separate humans. The therapist who admits to not fully understanding offers more than one who feigns transparency. The gap between persons does not close; it is inhabited. Attempting to eliminate it produces the loneliness it promised to cure. Accepting it generates genuine intimacy between subjects who recognize their irreducible difference.
Clinical work with migrants teaches that no country will be a complete home—but a partial home is enough. The analysand who accepts Babel stops searching for a pre-linguistic paradise that never existed.
References Gogolin, N. (2021). Tolerance for non-understanding: Understanding and its limits – the confusion of tongues. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 76–87). Routledge.
Updated: Feb 17
You crossed oceans to escape yourself. The conflict traveled in your carry-on luggage. What were you fleeing that caught up with you?
The forbidden question.
There is an interrogation the migrant avoids: why did I really leave? The official answer—opportunity, adventure, love—conceals less presentable motivations. I fled from a suffocating mother, from professional failure, from a version of myself I could not bear. The new country promised reinvention without confrontation. Changing the scenery to avoid changing the script.
Gogolin identifies patients who migrated to escape internal conflicts by disguising them as external pursuits. Geographic movement postpones psychic movement. But the avoided conflict reappears with a local accent: the same dynamics, the same impasses, the same dead ends. The subject who fled suffocating relationships finds suffocating relationships on the new continent. They traveled thousands of kilometers only to find themselves exactly where they started. The distance covered did not modify a single centimeter of their interior geography.
The analyst asks what the analysand avoids: what were you running from that has now caught up with you? The answer inaugurates genuine work. Without that question, therapy perpetuates the flight.
Reading: Gogolin, N. (2021). Tolerance for non-understanding: Understanding and its limits – the confusion of tongues. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 76–87). Routledge.