Trauma, Dislocation, and the Subject offers an original Lacanian reconstruction of displacement, trauma, the body and the limits of meaning. William Gomes argues that displacement is not simply movement across borders, nor only a legal, humanitarian, psychiatric or political condition. It is a structural disturbance in the subject's relation to language, law, the body, time, fantasy, home, mourning, jouissance, faith and non-faith, family, community, institution and the Other.
The book identifies structural displacement as a distinct theoretical phenomenon and develops Structural Displacement Theory: a Lacanian, psychosocial, material-political and spiritual-existential account of the displaced subject. It challenges approaches that reduce displaced people to victims, patients, legal categories, humanitarian objects, resilient survivors or diagnostic subjects.
Across thirty-one chapters, the book moves through the asylum interview, the institutional file, the interpreter, the waiting room, the refusal letter, the displaced body, the racialised gaze, the lost home, the child, the family, faith and non-faith, mourning, trauma, moral injury, clinical practice and the symptom. It shows how displacement is lived not only materially and politically, but structurally, psychically, bodily, socially and existentially.
At the centre of the book is the Structural Displacement Matrix, a non-diagnostic architecture through which displacement becomes lived, visible, misrecognised, contested and institutionally acted upon. The book also develops an ethics of listening grounded in dignity, opacity, non-mastery and the singularity of the subject.
Trauma, Dislocation, and the Subject will be valuable for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, psychiatrists, psychosocial researchers, refugee and forced migration scholars, legal practitioners, NGO workers, social workers, pastoral workers, policy professionals and students interested in trauma, migration, asylum, racism, psychoanalysis and the ethics of care.
