The Exile Complex

Abstract

AbstractTo be exiled is to be psychologically dismembered from all that one is, has been, and believes oneself to be. The rupture of belonging, identity, ancestral rootedness, and mythic centering are some of the psychic woundings that remain alive in people who are forcibly expelled from their native countries. The trauma of exile is an archetypal energy that has been globally constellated in our time. Exiles are those who have been pulled up by their roots, extricated from a history now annulled and suppressed as if it never existed. Often under the threat of death or imprisonment, exiles leave behind families, possessions, professions, social status, and everything that constituted their previous lives to face estrangement from all that provided symbolic rooting. While the immigrant is afforded the possibility of returning to the Mother(land), the exile is denied such a privilege. And often, the immigrant is received more positively than the exile by the host country population. In these pages I will explore the phenomenon of exile, its global crisis, its personal and cultural complex, and the instinctual longing for Mother(land) through mythopoetic lenses in order to enlarge this very painful, yet archetypally present, trauma of the human experience. AcknowledgmentThis paper was originally presented as a talk at the 2022 Spring IRSJA Conference.Additional informationNotes on contributorsLourdes HernandezLourdes Hernandez was marked by the traumas of war and political asylum when her family fled Cuba to take refuge in the United States. She holds post-graduate degrees from Pacifica Graduate Institute and Regis University in hermeneutics, counseling, and Jungian and archetypal studies. After a period of study in Zürich, Lourdes returned stateside to complete her analytic training with the IRSJA and currently has a bilingual private practice in Boulder, Colorado. Lourdes is a lifelong musician and visual artist who values the curative power of the symbolic psyche and its restorative interventions.