Group Analysis for Refugees Experiencing Trauma

In this prescient and sensitive volume, Aida Alayarian looks at how psychoanalysis in group settings can benefit refugees who have experienced trauma, with an express focus on transference and countertransference.

Group Analysis for Refugees Experiencing Trauma offers a comprehensive overview of trauma from a psychoanalytic perspective, before delving into the nuance of trauma experienced by asylum seekers, refugees and those who have gone through forced migration. Through clinical vignettes, Alayarian highlights the importance of the resilience that can be brought about from group sessions and shared experience in helping to heal the wounds of trauma. She looks at the vital role of social injustice in this trauma and shows how this can be directly applied to work with other groups experiencing human rights violations, destitution, and loss. She shows how looking at relational patterns as a means of understanding conscious, unconscious, and subconscious thought processes can provide essential breakthroughs with patients, as well as the importance of paying close attention to countertransference to avoid a breakdown of the clinical relationship.

Using psychoanalytic theories from intercultural perspectives to show the multidimensional nature of work with trauma patients, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health experts working with refugees and patients experiencing trauma.

Aida Alayarian is a psychoanalyst working in the UK. She is the co-founder, former Clinical Director and CEO and current chair of Trustees of the Refugee Therapy Centre, a charity in North London. She is the author of Resilience, Suffering and Creativity (2007), Consequences of Denial: The Armenian Genocide (2008), Trauma, Torture and Dissociation: A Psychoanalytic View (2011), Handbook of Working with Children, Trauma, and Resilience: An Intercultural Psychoanalytic View (2015) and Children of Refugees: Torture, Human Rights, and Psychological Consequences (2016).