Immigration in early childhood can be considered as a traumatic situation. It often goes unrecognized since children adapt to most conditions and conform to their environment with astonishing agility. Inspired by the sensitive work of Sándor Ferenczi, and Donald Winnicott, regarding the psychic economy of maturational processes, the author explores the concept of totalitarian functioning and its obstruction of the growing psyche. Before birth we are all totalitarian, one with the mother; this symbiotic, invincible state of survival mode is prolonged as the immature newborn child ignores the requirements of reality and enjoys omnipotent pleasure through hallucination. The loss of place in immigration often becomes the loss of identity-the question of "where am I?" becomes confused with "who am I?". Clinical practice exposes this fragility in adults torn from their home environment at an early age, forced into precocious maturity, never to grow up in reality. Through clinical examples, the author illustrates how totalitarian mental functioning of "all or nothing, right or wrong, black or white" is exposed in the transference and can be worked through within the psychoanalytical space. © 2016 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.

Early childhood trauma Maturation Totalitarian mind Identity loss Immigration

psychoanalytic theory object relation Emigrants and Immigrants Object Attachment Transference (Psychology) psychoanalysis Child Development Psychoanalytic Therapy human Humans migrant transference Child