The Life-Cohesion of the Migrant. Migration and Existential Orientation

De la cohésion de vie du migrant : déplacement migratoire et orientation existentielle

Marc Breviglieri (1, 2)

1 GSPM - Groupe de sociologie politique et morale
2 HES-SO - Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse Occidentale

Migration generates two distinct dispositions. The first one involves a nostalgic desire to take with oneself the place of origin in its entirety. The other disposition, seeming to escape all that pertains to the past, answers to the imperative of being reborn and to the temptation of forgetting. Each disposition places at the heart of the existential space a problematic of orientation, from which the migrant formulates the questions of the toward-where and for-what of existence. This article attempts to situate the stakes of migration at the level of the life-cohesion of the migrant. This level enables us to reconsider the full range of the wounds inflicted by migration (melancholia and loss, guilt and remorse, frustration and humiliation). It also allows us understand how these wounds open, heal up, and possibly put behind through a management which, far from only involving the self of the migrant, implicates simultaneously both the community of origin and the community of reception.

Mots clés: appartenance; causes des migrations; changement culturel; stratégie migratoire; départ; psychologie; psychosociologie

Domaines: Psychologie

Marc Breviglieri. De la cohésion de vie du migrant : déplacement migratoire et orientation existentielle. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 2010, vol. 26 (n°2), pp. 57-76. ⟨hal-01578027v2⟩