Migration: the pain of loss entwined with the promise of becoming

Migration is not only a physical relocation—it is a psychosocial process with lasting effects on identity. Leaving one’s country involves profound losses. Familiar food, native music, unquestioned customs, and even one’s language may need to be abandoned.

The new country, by contrast, presents strangeness at every turn: food with unfamiliar flavors, songs that do not yet resonate, political concerns that feel distant, festivals without emotional depth, heroes who carry no psychic meaning, and landscapes without history. Even the shared memory of a nation—the “earned history”—is absent.

Yet, alongside these losses, migration opens the possibility of psychic growth. New channels of self-expression emerge. Different models of identification appear. Superego dictates shift, ideals evolve. In this sense, migration forces the psyche into transformation, offering opportunities to reassemble identity in ways that would not have been possible otherwise.

As Hartmann (1950) noted, we all grow within an “average expectable environment.”

Migration disrupts this, replacing the predictable with the unfamiliar. What follows is both challenge and possibility in Migration: the pain of loss entwined with the promise of becoming.