Immigration, Psychic Dislocation, and the Re-creation of Community.

Communities are "psychic entities" that serve powerful psychological functions for the individuals living within them. They also serve multiple functions, including as a potential space where individuals are "held" and within which individuals "play" in ways akin to Winnicott's formulations regarding how infants "use" the me-not-me zone of experiencing, the potential space created by the gap between symbiotic engagement and the maternal object, in a zone between desire for fusion and fear of disintegrating abandonment. This paper explores the psychic destruction of community and the attempts to reconstruct "usable" community in migration, drawing from Winnicott and other psychoanalytic theorists to help us understand how communities work as psychological spaces and, specifically, to understand the near universal clustering that we see in immigrant communities.