Landscapes of Un/belonging: An Empirical Psychosocial Study of Lithuanian Migration to London since the Early 1990s

Abstract

This thesis illuminates the cultural imaginary of migrants who have come to London since the early 1990s from a poorly-known country, Lithuania. The country went through a traumatic history in the XXc., marked by the Holocaust and Soviet occupation, accompanied by mass deportations to labour camps and other forced settlements in remote parts of the Soviet Union. Since Lithuania gained its independence in the early 1990s, the population has been falling significantly, yet the academic literature is largely silent on this – even that of the UK, the primary destination of Lithuanian emigrants.

My psychosocial study investigates the possibility that this increased social and physical mobility of Lithuania’s population is partly related to an immobility within the ‘cultural psyche,’ related to the country’s exposure to repeated historical trauma over many decades. The study looks at how the cultural imaginary is produced out of this history. Regarding the present day, some migrants are ‘haunted’ by legacies of the past. People cannot provide a transparent and coherent story about their migration: they are defended about their status, are conflicted and nostalgic. The study explores and elucidates these intangibles.

The research cohort comprises and represents three generational groups, those in their 60s, 40s and 20s. Visual Matrix and Free Association Narrative Interview methods are used. Each matrix and interview is presented in the form of a case study: these case studies are crafted in a scenic way, as the thesis draws on the ideas of Alfred Lorenzer and has a strong imagistic stance. Furthermore, scenic compositions (in poetic form) are used to distil the gestalt of each case. The study looks at the findings in different age groups.

The findings are framed in terms of four imagistic metaphors: landscape, cityscape, escape and inscape. These present the imaginary as related, respectively, to ‘home’ country, to London, to migration, and to those states of mind generated by the migration experience. The metaphors also represent the cross-disciplinary nature of my study, as it draws largely on psychoanalytic thinking and psychosocial studies, and also on cultural geography and migration studies.

This thesis provides a psychoanalytically-informed, psychosocial and aesthetic analysis of migration, namely how it affects the imaginary that one calls to mind, particular ways in which one misses (or not) one’s country of origin, and how one settles in London. There is a search (by the research participants) for cultural containers in the imaginary, predominantly through landscape, which plays out differently between generational groups. Re-configuring of the cultural imaginary is explored using Winnicott’s psychoanalytic thinking on ‘object relating,’ ‘object use,’ and the ‘third space,’ and also using Bion’s theory on linking.