The article inquires into the effects of how exile and migration on normal inner conversion of early object relations and investigates the specific affective tinges they can give to the inevitable losses encountered in life. To establish the kind of psychic loss occasioned by what Thomas Mann called the »cardiasthma of exile«, the article explores the relation to the inner object Heimat (home/home country) with reference to examples from literature, clinical practice, and personal experience. Proceeding from Winnicott's concepts of the »environmental mother« and »transitional objects,« the author locates this relation in a »transitional space.« In this intermediary space, cultural experience is sustained by the experience of original unity with the primary object. Here reality is not experienced as something rigidly external but is »created« in the early cathectic process. The acquisition of the mother tongue takes a similar course. Being anchored in early experiences of interaction, it can function as a container for affective experience. Exile and migration erode this sustaining stratum, thus interfering with internal continuity. True arrival in a new country is only possible as a creative act, the creation of new transitional spaces, and not by adjusting to a reality perceived as rigid.

Transitional space Migration Exile Environmental mother Mother tongue home

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