Childhood Displacement and Its Impact on the Formation of the Personality

This article was initially presented at a Mental Health Congress in Tokyo, Japan in 2016. I think that the theme has universal relevance these days, with so much migration happening in diverse parts of the world.

The reasons for geographic displacement are multiple - disasters caused by nature (floods, earthquakes, droughts); political clashes and civil wars; major shifts in a country's economy causing large numbers of people to migrate from rural areas to larger cities.

All of this can create major trauma for families. Children are helplessly caught in these shifts, affecting their security, sense of continuity, and the natural path of their personality development.

In this article I will discuss three main themes – Firstly, what types of major crises can lead to displacement; Secondly, look at the types of trauma that are associated with devastating events that lead to displacement; Thirdly, how does this trauma affect personality development in a child.

And that leads me to the core theme of this paper – What happens to Personality Development when a child is caught in the midst of a major uncontrollable crisis leading to displacement.

The result of these major crises is that they trigger off a sudden and chaotic forced displacement. Along with that, they produce serious psychological trauma.

At the other end of the spectrum are the less chaotic, less intense and more planned displacements, such as immigration to a different country and to a very different culture. Or, even a move by the family to a different part of the country. Those latter situations may seem less dramatic, but we, as psychologically informed professionals, know that even though on the surface there may not seem any obvious or severe symptomatology, however, we know that what happens in the child’s “inner world” and their disturbing fantasies is another matter.

In terms of the process of a child being able to acquire and build up a healthy personality, the unfortunate fact is that – metaphorically speaking – when there is an ongoing earthquake, it makes it impossible to put the “bricks” of personality structure together one by one to build a solid and long-lasting personality formation.

Now, examining further the connection between displacement and personality formation/development, it is obvious that the experience of displacement of any kind is traumatic. Trauma, in turn, is the major disruptive factor that can severely interfere with healthy personality development. We are all psychologically programmed to function best when there is calmness, predictability, continuity and familiarity.

The unknown and the unfamiliar makes us anxious. Thus when we are faced with uncertainty, our mind goes into the “what if …” or “what if something goes wrong” mode, and usually anticipates the negatives rather than the positives. This is the factor that subsequently escalates the sense of trauma.

Commentary on Trauma

Since the young child is totally dependent on the parents, the effect of traumatic situations on the child will be very much dependent on the capacity of the parents to handle trauma. If the circumstances are devastating, then even the most stable set of parents will suffer from huge stress. Their anxieties, moods and hopelessness will spill over into the child, and severely affect their development.

When discussing trauma, we have to recognise that there are many different types of trauma. We have to differentiate the different levels, the sources, and the range of severity that are all part of a traumatic experience:

a. Trauma can happen at different levels of intensity and severity.

At the most severe level, there are the situations where a traumatic event can be so overwhelming that the psyche shuts down and goes into “zero process” or a frozen state, with subsequent defence mechanisms taking over, such as denial, splitting, repression, dissociation, etc. The younger the victim, the more disturbing the consequences can be. The term “zero process” was suggested by Dr. Joseph Frenando * (a Toronto psychoanalyst) in his attempt to clarify the understanding of trauma states. He says that the key characteristic of “zero process” is that, because of the overwhelming nature, there is a lack of ability to process experiences as they actually occur. The content remains in a frozen state, with no further movement or processing, as compared for instance to the displacements and condensations of the “primary process”. Thus he adds his new term to Freud’s existing terminology of “secondary process” (which is equivalent to conscious thinking and communication), and “primary process” (which takes place at the unconscious level). The more severe the trauma, the more frozen, shut off and unreachable are the emotions and the actual memories.

There is another factor that we have to be aware of. In the instances where one or more family members have been exposed to overwhelming trauma, there can occur an intergenerational transmission through the fact that the horrible event is frozen and encapsulated and repressed into the deeper layers of the mind. Therefore this content is not available to the conscious secondary process. The event is too overwhelming to allow it to reside there. An example of this would be a child who has been caught up in the midst of major chaos, where the parents have not been emotionally or physically available. Even when the crisis subsides, its effects can manifest themselves in indirect ways through fears, avoidances and vulnerabilities. This is the “emotional baggage” that can get passed on to the next generation and to the next one after that. The transmission of the most repressed experiences usually takes place at an unconscious level. This can be seen in families that were caught up in the Holocaust, or under the terrorist rule of Communism, or in some of the African countries, such as Rwanda.

Next, there can also be low-level on-going trauma which from the outside may not be so evident, yet it can cause damaging and long-lasting effects in the victim. An example of this is psychological or physical deprivation that can happen to an infant or a child under certain circumstances, such as, where the parents go through a slower displacement through planned immigration or shift of living environment because of employment changes. This is referred to as “cumulative trauma”. This is where early and effective intervention is crucial.

b. Next are the sources of trauma. Trauma can be caused by human actions – physical or psychological, in the contexts of political, religious or territorial conflicts. Examples are war, massacres, atomic bomb explosions, hostage-taking, rule by terror. Whereas active warfare involving soldiers and weapons causes physical destructiveness along with psychological repercussions, rule by terror, on the other hand, causes primarily psychological damage, and often of massive proportions. One example was the Communist rule in Eastern Europe. People were spied upon, made to confess falsely and often executed. There was a constant fear and a total lack of trust in anybody. The psychoanalyst Leonard Schengold ** calls it “soul murder”. You can imagine the psychological effect on children when families have to live in these threatening and persecutory surroundings.

c. Another source of trauma, that I have already mentioned, can be caused by inanimate forces such as natural disasters - tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis and floods. Trauma in cases like this is not just the destructiveness of the natural original event, but all the subsequent chain-reaction complications.

The next point is that the impact of trauma is closely associated with the different defence mechanisms that get triggered. These are necessary survival mechanisms that help a person or a group to get through an overwhelming and unbearable emotional experience . However, it also becomes a problem in the longer term. The defences prevent us from dealing with the world in a more effective and realistic way. Our emotional functioning becomes compromised and stunted. We remain vulnerable to re-experiencing similar shocks when exposed to sensitised situations. When trauma happens, the common defences that come into play are splitting and denial, i.e. the unbearable part gets split off from the overall experience, and then is excluded from the conscious mind through denial of its existence. Projection is another common defence, i.e. externalising the blame and holding others or external circumstances responsible for what happened. The defence of intellectualisation allows us to avoid being in touch with the intense feelings connected with the event. If these defence mechanisms are not dealt with and resolved, then we are left with a compromised state of psychological functioning. We will never have a chance to address and re-examine the real event that took place, with the hope that it can help to modify the extreme feelings that have shut us down. Therefore as mental health professionals, we always have to think about possible repressed and unresolved trauma that may lay at the base of our patients’ dysfunctionality. The unresolved defence patterns are one factor that creates the continuity of trauma in an individual’s life or in a whole segment of the population. There is still much controversy over what constitutes the most effective approach when dealing with trauma cases.

Having talked about the negative effect of the unknown, and how it adversely affects us, there is paradoxically another part within us that also searches for the new and the unknown. We see this in infants as they start out in life by exploring their environment in the immediate space around them. They try to get to know the objects around them through oral exploration – everything goes into their mouth because it is a more highly developed sensory system. When infants feel secure they explore, when insecure, they withdraw. We can mention here the psychoanalytic theory described by Melanie Klein - “the good breast versus the bad breast”. The good breast provides us with the necessary nurturing that enables us to build a sense of security, whereas the bad breast makes us go into the defensive and self-preserving mode. We see this in children when they feel insecure, they often resort to sucking their thumb. They switch from extending outwards to withdrawing inwards. (self-soothing).

This Kleinian theoretical viewpoint is expanded in the psychoanalytic field to further include the broader spectrum of good and bad experiences and people. One person may seem like the “all good person” while the other one may be seen as the ”all bad person”. Traumatic experiences contribute to this split.

Personality Development.

This leads us to the next topic – Personality Development, and the pathological impact of displacement on that process. Before we can proceed to that part, I think that it is important to comment on the following – For healthy personality development to take place, there need to be the following conditions:

- A safe, calm, consistent environment for the infant, that provides a sense of containment and holding and nurturing. Only then can the healthy basic attachment ties start developing.

- The process of nurturing needs both – (a.) the physical and practical aspect, such as food, warmth, comfort and quiet; as well as

(b.) the emotional aspect of nurturing through gentle body contact between mother/parent and infant. Along with that, there needs to be affective communication (verbal – chatting, cooing, singing) and a state of attunement (an attempt to continuously read the infant’s non-verbal messages, and to respond to them). In order to provide the above, the caregiver has to be able to remain calm, tolerant and alert. In other words, to be able to provide a Secure Base.

We come into this world as a newborn who already is endowed with a certain genetic structure and a potential, and a certain temperament.

This is often referred to as the “easy baby” or the “difficult baby” (Stella Chess). The other crucial factor is the environment that the baby is born into. In English, these two factors are referred to as Nature vs. Nurture.

There has been a lot of research and publishing on the influence of the environment on the infant’s personality development. The crucial part in this is the role of the care providers – the most important one usually is the mother. Nowadays nannies and daycares are playing an increasingly more important role. This can be seen as another sort of displacement - away from the intimacy and familiarity of the mother.

Fathers, important as they are, usually are not able to spend as much time with the child as the mother does.

To further understand how one’s personality develops, I will briefly discuss the psychological process of absorbing into one’s self the experiences of early childhood that we have had with our significant care providers around us. These are the inner resources for us as adults that guide us throughout life. The phrases that are sometimes used are – “the parent within us” or “the competitive sibling within us”. We may find ourselves dialoguing with these internalised persons (in the psychoanalytic field referred to as “objects”). The dynamics of establishing such an Internal Object World or so-called Inner World are most clearly described by using the psychoanalytic Object Relations theory perspective.

In an optimal environment, the infant’s first experiences are in the context of a loving, caring relationship (warmth, attention, attunement, holding). The consistency and continuity of this close experience between the actual parent and the infant sets up memory traces in the infant’s mind that slowly become consolidated into psychological representations and patterns – which are a combination of the actual caregiver and the specific infant’s subjective impressions. ( This is well described by researchers such as Daniel Stern, Peter Fonagy, Robert Emde, etc.). In the very early stages these representations are unintegrated (Klein’s “Good Breast and Bad Breast”). For some patients, these remain permanently split into a primarily good and bad world. These experiences and impressions become internalised over time (the dynamics of incorporation, introjection). The INNER WORLD becomes populated with INTERNAL OBJECTS (either as split or integrated objects = Kleinian concept of the shift from “paranoid-schizoid state” of splits to depressive position of integration). As time goes on and as the infant’s and child’s mind expands and matures with the accumulation of relational experiences, the internal objects are slowly reshaped and become more realistic. And hopefully, in a positive environment, the internal objects are reshaped into more integrated and healthier entities. However, in unfavourable circumstances the process may become arrested, i.e. maturational stuck-points or arrests happen. For example, an internalised mother figure, who originally in the child’s experience and mind was a combination of all good and loving, and at other times all bad, mean and punitive, never reached a point of integration – that is, never became the same mother who could alternate between love and harshness. This happens more dramatically with a parent who is bipolar, alcoholic, a borderline personality, or going through the chaos of displacement. A child is unable to integrate the dramatic polarities, and thus the internal objects retain split representations. Whatever is the dominant part-object in the child’s experience, that will constitute the dominant internalised mother or father.

As examples could be – the unavailable, distant, depressed mother, or the anxious or needy mother, rather than the containing and stable one. And this has a very lasting effect into our adult lives as to how we read others through our subjectively coloured glasses. As you may know, this constitutes the basis of the concept of Transference. If in our new relationship there is a trace of familiarity in the other person that bears some resemblance to the original object (our parent), then our mind can blow this up to an exaggerated degree, and now we are relating to the new person as though they are a replica of our mother or father or sibling. Therefore you can see the strong influence that our internalised representations of our early years exert on our present relationships. In other words, the more disturbed or disintegrated psychologically our early objects (our parents) were, the more we are doomed to experience the world in a similar disintegrated way. Psychotherapy helps to repair this damage.

Displacement’s negative impact on Personality Development.

Now we come to the point where we can put together all the information that I have given so far, and try to understand more clearly the negative impact that displacement causes.

Needless to say, the chaos, stress, fear and uncertainty that is caused by major crises – man-made or nature-made, severely disrupts and destroys the basic ingredients and needs that have to be in place for the formation of a healthy and vibrant personality. So much of it depends on the ability of the parents and the extended family to deal with the stressful circumstances. If the parents themselves have had a healthy, stable growing up experience, and thus have developed a good capacity for emotional containment and resilience, then the displaced child will have an easier time to navigate through the storm, metaphorically speaking.

The major pathologic psychological consequences that develop from traumatic displacements are the following:

- There is a very high level of anxiety and a low threshold for containment, because of being exposed to continuous chaos, uncertainty and fear. Children may become excessively dependent and clingy. They often have fear of going to sleep, and when they do sleep, they have terrifying nightmares. Their insecurity manifests itself in many different ways.

- There is a lack of trust of authorities, and a fear of authorities, particularly when the crisis has been caused by human large-scale conflict. Children will display avoidant and devious behaviour. A dramatic example of this is the Gaza Strip in the Middle East, the and intense conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

- As a consequence of the uncontrollable nature of the disaster, there is an increased need to establish personal control on a small scale. In other words, this leads to Obsessive-Compulsive behaviour patterns.

- Another consequence can be the formation of introversion, where a child avoids social contact. This can be seen as a result of losing one’s own familiar and safe living space and having been displaced into a loud overcrowded environment. As adults, these are the people who prefer “alone-space” rather than “shared-together-space”.

- I have mentioned that trauma triggers off defence mechanisms. A very common one is splitting off the unbearable, overwhelming memories and feelings, and blocking them off from the conscious part of the mind.

In other words, repressing them. The problem is that they become unavailable to be talked about and worked through, and thus, hopefully, put into a healthier perspective. Psychotherapy may help to unlock this shut-off state.

- A further consequence of Displacement can be a state of confusion that creates insecurity and dysfunction. When a person or a family is displaced into a very different and strange setting, with new cultural norms and expectations, it can significantly affect the parenting process and the child’s split experience – that has to navigate the conflict between “the old accustomed way” and “the new here-and-now way”.

They are strangers in a strange land.

Kaspars Tuters graduated from the Medical Faculty at the University of Toronto, Canada in 1963, did his Psychoanalytic Training at The British Institute of Psychoanalysis in London and is a Full Member of the International Psychoanalytic Association since 1979. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He lectures on Understanding the (Multi)Cultural Context and Trauma among others.