The Impact of Loss and Mourning on Soviet Émigré Teenagers and Their Families: Some Implications for Practice

Abstract:

This article integrates a three-year experience of working with Soviet adolescents and their families in individual, family, and group psychotherapy that focused on facilitating their adjustment process. For Soviet emigre teenagers, this adjustment process is greatly affected by their difficulty accomplishing the necessary developmental tasks of adolescence: separation and individuation. The healthy process of adaptation to life in a new country requires mourning of the losses that resulted from emigration. The inability to go through the mourning process on the family and individual level impedes the process of separation and individuation.

In Journal of Jewish Communal Service, v.72 no.4, Summer 1996.