[Getting old on foreign earth: more suffering from exile].

Abstract

This paper, which refers to psychoanalysis and anthropology, is devoted to the clinical impact of suffering to get old on foreign earth, at the junction of singularity and culture, on psychic and social sides. It presents some elements on: the discontentment or even the misery of those called foreign workers and who, however, live more and more their retirement and their old age far from the world which contains their language and their culture; the necessity of a redevelopment of settings for listening, when confronted to a suffering whose expressive forms exceed the logic underlying the classical conceptual frames, and disturbs the social and caregiver professionals. This approach leaves place, at first, to the subjective resonance of exile without which one cannot understand what old subjects have to pass through. This exile, which cannot be reduced to emigration, and which sometimes is again actualized with violence during the passage to retirement and aging, reminds to each one his incompleteness and mortality. It disturbs the self-feeling and the relation to others, which require to pass by cultural references to feel being protected and humanized. Listening, to be efficient, should not break or emphasize their difference, but has to be attentive to the peculiar link which connects him to its culture; link which allows him to give sense in every decisive moment of existence.