Inhabiting the Non-Home

“Desperate is the one who must leave to live a different culture,” sang Mercedes Sosa with that breathtaking voice that makes it impossible not to identify with her. Listening to her, one cannot help but pause and think of migration as a reality—whether chosen or inevitable—that pierces us both objectively and subjectively.

In my own life, migration is not a textbook concept; it is my emotional heritage, the heartbeat of my internalized history. It is the biography of my grandparents, my parents, my own, and now, the one I bequeath to my children. Although I do not feel "desperate" in the literal sense of the word, I fully agree with the poetics of uprooting: leaving a home to attempt to transcribe one's life onto another stage, another culture, and another language is a painful process; a challenge that shakes the very foundations of identity.

Of course, migrating is a life opportunity: from saving a life to reinventing one. It means discovering new horizons, experiencing new things, connecting with others, and encountering unknown parts of oneself that are fascinating. But for the purposes of this writing, I reflect on the mourning inherent in every experience where something is lost—in this case, a life—even if another is gained.

The reasons for leaving are as individual as the journey itself. There are cruel migrations, forced by the urgency of survival, where the trauma is so acute that, as a defense mechanism, the subject stops feeling in order to keep walking. These "life or death" stories marked my grandparents and, in some way, continue to vibrate today in the family tree.

But I also want to pause on those other journeys: those born from the privilege of choice. Those where there is space to think, discuss, and choose: “Do I stay or do I go?” And even when there is will, the soul never emerges unscathed. One cannot foresee the effects that the act of untying oneself from the known will have on every level. Sometimes we migrate seeking an economic opportunity or out of family necessity; other times, we do so trying to fill an internal void with the fantasy that "the new" will magically complete us.

However, sometimes that need to depart without an apparent threat hides an invisible root. Here, what Yolanda Gampel describes as the "radioactivity" of trauma resonates. As if dealing with an atomic bomb that exploded generations ago, the trauma emits a toxic charge that is inherited symbolically from parents to children. We can hereditarily internalize the need to flee or to seek another horizon almost as a subsistence strategy engraved in the unconscious. When migrating, we sometimes not only seek a better future, but we respond to pains and mandates that were not even ours, but which continue to burn and push us toward unimaginable challenges.

Psychoanalysis teaches us that what is not processed through words inevitably finds a destination in the body or in the act. Migration thus acts as a potent trigger that leads us to stumble upon an emotional life with which we had no contact. Parts of us emerge that were there, crouching, and which were—as Christopher Bollas called it—the "known unthought": internal experiences and knowledge about ourselves that have marked our structure, but which we had never before managed to formulate or consciously feel.

I remember "Nadia" (a pseudonym), a 28-year-old woman who came to my practice. She had migrated from Russia at the age of six. In her conscious narrative, everything had turned out "well": she learned the language, graduated, made friends. However, decades later, when faced with the decision to undergo bariatric surgery, the traumas of her migration—which had remained in a state of latency—emerged with devastating physical force.

"I was so thin, so thin," she told me with deep anguish, "but when I came here, I started eating non-stop... look at me now."

While her parents struggled to survive in a strange country, accepting jobs far removed from their professions to sustain the family economy, Nadia was left in the care of strangers. In that solitude, she was a victim of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that she never named. Her silence was not forgetting; it was a survival mechanism so as not to be "one more burden" for her parents, who already carried the weight of letting go and the effort of building a new life. As Joyce McDougall describes in Theaters of the Body, Nadia turned her own flesh into the stage where the drama that could not be spoken was performed. Her weight gain was a way of "anchoring" herself, of occupying an indisputable physical space in a culture where she felt invisible or uncertain.

This imbalance confronts us with what Freud called Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny, also known as the "non-home"). It is that strange sensation where what should be familiar—our house, our language, our own body—suddenly becomes alien and hostile. It is a very singular and complex sensation, as we perceive something as familiar and foreign at the same time. Freud explained that the uncanny is that reality which should have remained hidden but has come to light and cannot be denied. The migrant sometimes lives in the tension of the "non-home," feeling like a stranger even within their own four walls, because they have lost the reference points that sustained who they were in the eyes of others.

All this must be understood as unconscious reactions that do not always have a sequential narrative logic. Emigrating, leaving everything behind, and facing the challenge of starting over is a transcendental life event. As such, it awakens intense emotions and can be the trigger that brings to light events that had remained buried in the seas of the mind, sometimes without name or description.

It is at this breaking point where the vision of Viktor Frankl profoundly complements the Freudian gaze. If Freud helps us understand why we feel disarmed and how the past inhabits us, Frankl offers the foundation to rebuild ourselves upon those ruins. He taught us that, although we cannot control the harshness of immediate reality or the bitter circumstances of exile, we always retain the intimate freedom to decide how to react and what position to take toward them.

Every personality and every emotional history possesses, at its core, the qualities to react differently to similar events. Frankl's greatest teaching is the courage to act even when no light is visible and one's strength is weakened by hopelessness. It is not blind optimism, but a creative search for tools for authentic adaptation. It is about finding, amidst the chaos of the "non-home," the foundations for a reinvention that does not ignore pain, but uses it to heal and find a new order of life that has logic, meaning, and connection.

Migrating is, ultimately, dismantling one structure to attempt to assemble another. Sometimes, in the eagerness to fit in, we leave shreds of our identity along the way. But recognizing those wounds, naming the "unthought," and rehabilitating the soul is the first step so that the "non-home" ceases to be a ghost and finally becomes a place of one's own.

The journey is not only from one country to another, but from denial to integration; a path to rehabilitate the body and life, finally opening those drawers of the soul that were locked to seek a growth that, although painful, is profoundly potent and authentic.