Transgenerational transmission of trauma effects after forced migration in refugee families from former Yugoslavia – psychosocial impacts for adolescent development and self-culturalization processes
Ina Kulić, Sigmund-Freud-Institut / Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Contact: kulic@sigmund-freud-institut.de
Surprisingly little is known about medium- and long-term intergenerational dynamics and psychosocial challenges of forced migration. Children whose parents experienced war have to cope with difficult circumstances while growing up. As part of the PhD programme “Psychosocial impacts of (forced) migration – generational dynamics and adolescent processes” located at Sigmund-Freud-Institute, this research explores how young women, whose parents fled from the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, develop their identity. To this end, the study focuses on complex transgenerational implications and (latent) mechanisms of transmission within families. In this context, it is assumed that parental experiences of multiple losses entail psychosocial consequences that are transmitted to their children and influence their identity especially during adolescence. Drawing on a family’s ethnic or cultural tradition can be an attempt to cope with feelings of alienation and inner tensions, to compensate experienced lack of attachment and orientation, or to deal with uncertainty and self-alienation when negotiating one's own individuality (King 2016). The aim of this study is to gain insights into the psychological function of cultural self-positioning as a form of coping with the families’ war experience. To hone our understanding of how refugee children of the 90s are affected by what their parents witnessed, the following two research questions emerge (1) How do young women process their parents’ war experience and in which ways does it affect their identity and feeling of belonging? (2) Which psychosocial functions do self-culturalisation processes have?
First results show that, both in terms of family dynamics and for the women themselves, the first years in the country of arrival have a lasting effect on their narrative identity. In the young women's biographies, the war is described as a highly influential formative event, even though they often did not consciously experience it themselves ("I didn’t understand anything, but I felt it"). During the first interviews, topics such as a lack of family processing and the search for one's own history and feelings of being torn apart came up. In addition, a high sense of responsibility towards the family and of guilt as well as a need for compensation and tendencies of high expectations of achievement was mentioned frequently. Another salient dimension are narrations about the burdensome external conditions and experiences after migration. To obtain qualitative data, multilingual and multigenerational narrative interviews are conducted with six women between 18 and 30 and their parents. As the aim of the project is to reconstruct latent structures, the analysis of the interviews is carried out by applying a qualitative-reconstructive approach with narrative analysis (Schütze 1983) including scenic elements (Lorenzer 1983) as well as by evaluating field protocols.