Involuntary Dislocation

Involuntary Dislocation

Renos K. Papadopoulos clearly and sensitively explores the experiences of people who reluctantly abandon their homes, searching for safer lives elsewhere, and provides a detailed guide to the complex experiences of involuntary dislocation. Involuntary Dislocation: Home, Trauma, Resilience, and Adversity-Activated Development identifies involuntary dislocation as a distinct phenomenon, challenging existing assumptions and established positions, and explores its linguistic, historical, and cultural contexts. Papadopoulos elaborates on key themes including home, identity, nostalgic disorientation, the victim, and trauma, providing an in-depth understanding of each contributing factor whilst emphasising the human experience throughout. The book concludes by articulating an approach to conceptualising and working with people who have experienced adversities engendered by involuntary dislocation, and with a reflection on the language of repair and renewal. Involuntary Dislocation will be a compassionate and comprehensive guide for psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, and other professionals working with people who have experienced displacement. It will also be important reading for anyone wishing to understand the psychosocial impact of extreme adversity. "A sensitive and innovative elaboration of the complex experiences of trauma and dislocation, showing faith in human dignity and resilience!" - Arvo Pärt "Climate change, global inequities, and continued political strife will force increasing numbers of people to flee their homes and struggle to rebuild their lives in new places. In this deeply insightful, critical and creative work, Renos Papadopoulos brings to bear his vast experience in working with refugees and others grappling with dislocation, migration and exile to illuminate their varied predicaments and paths to growth and well-being. In brilliant analyses, he lays bare the epistemological traps of current thinking about trauma and resilience and charts a radical new course. Rich with generative models and metaphors, the frameworks he develops offer powerful ways to understand and respond to the complexities of dislocation through a socially, culturally, and politically informed depth psychology that mobilizes our most human capacities for agency and poiesis ." – Laurence J. Kirmayer, M.D., FRCPC, FCAHS. FRSC, James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University "Renos K. Papadopoulos in his new book has written a brilliant analysis of the suffering and the healing associated with the violent loss of home. He offers us a new way of thinking on a much-neglected area in the fields of medicine, mental health and humanitarian aid. He is a master craftsman, building upon philosophy and science to create a new healing approach called ‘Synergic Therapeutic Complexity’. His therapeutic model is based upon the lifetime experience of a gifted clinician. His book is praised for expanding the trauma story by deeply listening to the poetical 'other voice’ of human suffering and adversity. A most important contribution to a major topic!" - Reichard F. Mollica, M.D. Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Director: Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, USA "Papadopoulos unpacks the seductively simple terms of contemporary psychiatric discourse. He exposes the ethical and methodological problems of psychiatry’s pretense to expert knowledge, and unmasks the shallowness of procedures whose claim is to repair the damaged minds of patients. Based on a historically grounded understanding of human wellbeing and a synergic vision of therapy, he acknowledges those who suffer of adversity as partners in a joint endeavor. Thus, rather than sorting patients into fixed identities, his book provides a passionate and erudite plea for a therapeutic poetics that reveals the richness of possibilities inherent in all human experience, including involuntary dislocation." - Professor José Brunner, Tel Aviv University, Israel "A splendid achievement of decades of theoretical and clinical work on migration and involuntary dislocation. Renos Papadopoulos carefully expands our lexicon on this current problem, and his integrative multi-level approach gives innovative guidance to all psychosocial experts in this field." - Andreas Maercker, PhD, MD, Professor of Psychology and Chair, University of Zurich, Switzerland "Though the need to humanise the refugee protection discourse is increasingly understood, the rigid taxonomy that informs the design of refugee support services, in both the statutory and voluntary sectors, systematically fails to acknowledge the subjectivity of the refugee experience. In doing so, the need to personalise the help we offer is often overlooked and the quality of the protection we provide is diminished. In this welcome book, Professor Papadopoulos posits an approach that is rooted in the singularity of the enforced exile experience and