Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how social integration infused psychotherapeutic practices targeting traumatized refugees. It scrutinizes how integration got transformed from a migration-related policy to becoming the El Dorado of psychotherapy: an equivalent of recovery and healing.

Paper long abstract:

While trauma used to be mobilized to legitimize the victim status and to identify “real refugees” (Fassin & Rechtman, 2007), we are now witnessing a new trauma regime focused on survival. In the case of refugees, this survival paradigm gets intertwined with integration and creates new hierarchies and categorizations: the good and the bad refugees, the good being the ones able to survive, overcome their trauma, and integrate into their new communities.

Despite the critique of this integration apparatus in social sciences scholarship, migrant activist circles, and most of the time, therapeutic spaces engaged with exiles, with this categorization, these spaces couldn't escape taking on a new role. Therapy became, also, a space of strengthening the capacities of survival and integration of the “not-yet integrated” refugees, a process that reshaped the therapist-patient relationship, the therapists’ role, the expectations from therapy and the therapeutic practices themselves.

Integration is transformed not only into a moral imperative by the host society but also into an individual psychological competency that psychotherapy works on developing and accompanying. Through an ethnography of a therapeutic space for refugees in Sweden, this paper scrutinises how integration infused the clinical world, became the new equivalent for trauma recovery and the El Dorado of psychotherapy targeting exiles.