Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic process with individuals and couples focuses on exploring unconscious patterns, past experiences, and deep-rooted emotional conflicts that shape one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. For individuals, it helps uncover internal dynamics and unresolved issues that may hinder personal growth. For couples, it examines how each partner’s inner world and histories influence the relationship, fostering deeper understanding, communication, and emotional connection. The work typically involves reflection, interpretation, and insight, aiming to bring unconscious material to awareness and promote lasting change.
When we cross geographical borders, we also come across internal, silent, and sometimes unknown borders. Living outside one’s country of origin is, in itself, a transformative experience. Cultural differences are not only manifested in everyday gestures or the language spoken, but in the way affection is expressed, how one deals with conflict, with time, with silence, with the body, with desire. Often, what seemed like a simple change of country turns out to be a more profound change.
If there are children, the complexity increases: how to align different worldviews and ways of educating?
How to pass on cultural heritage and still offer this new generation a sense of belonging? How to balance roots and wings, tradition and cultural openness?
In this context, therapeutic listening offers a space where these differences can be welcomed and understood without judgment. A place where it is possible to work through the conflicts that emerge when cultures meet during the migratory experience, find words for what seemed unspeakable, and recognize in the other – whether in a romantic relationship with a partner from another culture or in work relationships with people from other countries – not only a foreigner, but also a companion on the journey.
My work, supported by both analytical listening and my personal experience in 8 countries, is to help immigrants rebuild their bonds on new foundations, in a more conscious way. Because even on foreign soil, it is possible to create an emotional home.