Since the beginning of the conflict, on February 24, thousands of Ukrainians have been forced to flee their country and solidarity with them is being organized everywhere. More than two and a half million of them have already fled Ukraine. Decryption of this new violence for them in this war, with the psychoanalyst Claude Halmos.
franceinfo: We would like to come back with you, Claude Halmos, on what such a need to flee makes psychologically live for refugees, adults and children.
Claude Halmos: The Ukrainians who leave their country do so when they have already suffered a series of traumas: they have lived in destruction, the permanent risk of death for themselves, their children, their loved ones, and often even their real death; into utter material deprivation, chaos, and terror.
Confronted with an enemy who claims to be all-powerful and determined to annihilate them; which is terrifying, like a nightmare coming true. And can also awaken, in some people – because a trauma always brings back, unconsciously, the previous ones – the memory of previous sufferings. And it is in this situation of extreme psychological fragility that these Ukrainians must flee.
What does such a flight represent, psychologically?
It’s a terrible ordeal because when they need, after all these upheavals, to find a familiar and reassuring universe, they have to try to survive, flee into the unknown; by abandoning – without knowing moreover if they will not completely disappear – their home, their professional world, their loved ones (that is to say, everything that made up, on a material and relational level, their life) .
And therefore losing the traces of their history, but also many of their identity markers because the consciousness that we have of ourselves is also based on the familiar things that surround us.
And it is in this state of distress and vulnerability that they will have, like all exiles, on the one hand to mourn the life they left behind, and the person they have summer. And on the other hand to put in place, to try to build a new life, new benchmarks. What is, on the psychological level, a double work, colossal.
Is it also difficult for children?
It is perhaps even more difficult for the children because they suffer, so to speak, doubly: they have experienced, without always understanding them, the same traumas and the same losses as their parents. But in addition they have often lost – having had the experience of seeing them themselves, totally panicked – something of the absolute security that their parents represented for them.
It is therefore essential to welcome these refugees. They need help to lead a life in which they are neither hungry nor cold; and future prospects. But above all they need human warmth, that is to say people who understand their suffering. They need humanity to rebuild what the inhumanity of this war has destroyed in them; and find a place.