Displacement, Nostalgia and the Uncanny

This course will take place Mondays, June 15, 22, 29, and July 6, 2026 from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm at St. Clement's Episcopal Church in Berkeley.

The experience of displacement renders linearity and rationality obsolete. By its very nature, this experience not only disrupts the continuity of space, time and being oneself, but also severs the in-between cultural landscape of home, while the host country’s tastes, smells, climate and customs remain alien and are often experienced as an assault on senses. The displacement often brings about the semi-psychotic states of mind that catapult the newcomers back to the familiar at the risk of them being mutated into pillars of salt, the petrified state of looking back. It also gives rise to the uncanny, something concealed and obscure, albeit familiar, that creates a sense of eeriness when it comes to light. Here, the uncanny does not relate exclusively to Freud’s conceptualization of the return of the repressed, but also to the return of disavowed socio-cultural layers. In this seminar, we will use art, film and other disciplines in the humanities, as well as clinical vignettes and psychoanalytic theory, as a springboard to explore these phenomena as presented by immigrant patients. Also, we will address ways of being with them both as an immigrant and native-born clinician. Special attention will be paid to witnessing, enactment and self-disclosure in the clinical encounter.

For more details about this event, CE, and general information, please visit the event page on our website.

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