In this episode, Rebecca Burns speaks to Maria Laguna, who works with immigrant clients in private practice and teaches about migration issues from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Maria’s work is deeply informed by Donald Winnicott, especially his ideas around transitional spaces, play, creativity, culture, and the relationship between the inner world and the external environment.

The conversation explores diasporic placemaking, and how migrant communities create spaces of belonging while navigating the experience of feeling neither fully here nor there. Maria discusses examples from New York, Los Angeles, Montevideo and Rome, including community gardens, Little Tokyo, Candombe in Barrio Sur, and Las Leonas, a documentary about migrant women playing football on the outskirts of Rome.

Maria discusses the emotional and cultural complexity of migration, including belonging, cultural mourning, language, food, music, memory, intergenerational transmission, safety, activism, and the ways migrant communities transform the places they arrive in while also being transformed by them.

The episode also explores how familiar objects, rituals, colours, songs, meals, gardens, dances and communal practices can act like transitional objects: carrying something of home into an unfamiliar world, and helping people feel held, recognised and rehumanised.

Maria also reflects on the role of therapy, social justice and community work in supporting migrants, and how therapists might pay closer attention to the physical, cultural and political environments their patients are living within.

This is a conversation about home as something relational and creative: something made through people, places, shared practices, memories, play, and the spaces where we are allowed to feel safe enough to become ourselves.

Links:

Instagram: @mariaverolaguna and @migrantes UY

Conference Panel: Diasporic Placemaking as Healing and Resistance

Website: www.psychoanalysisandsocialjustice.com

Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org