Identity versus integration

An event of the DPG Institute Hamburg and the Michael Balint Institute together with the Welcome Culture House of the Christian Church Ottensen.

"I'm a foreigner and that's a good thing,” is the title of a book by author Mahmood Falaki. He will read from his book on Friday, March 16 at 7 p.m. The psychoanalysts Katja Westlund-Morgenstern and Gabriele Amelung will then examine the concepts of identity and integration from a psychoanalytic point of view.

In social discourse, identity and integration are highly charged keywords when it comes to migration and refugees. This leads to demarcations, even to the point of enemy images. The supposedly own German identity is described as threatened and it is claimed that this sense of threat is increasingly prevalent in some sections of the population.

Foreigners and newcomers, but also those living here in the second or third generation, are being asked to integrate, underpinned by demands for others
legal requirements. A subliminal to open fear seems to resonate that the immigrants reject this and insist on their own values ​​and identities.
These are often experienced as strange and threatening, often without being concretely tangible or defined.

Could a different understanding of identity help in this situation? Integration could then be seen as a process that has to be designed creatively by all those involved. But what does our identity actually mean? Who is we? And is there only one identity? Can the concept of identity help at all in this discussion? Don't we have to constantly integrate different facets of old and new, psychological and cognitive, social and cultural identity components into ourselves?

We will try to answer these questions together. We look forward to a stimulating exchange and an exciting discussion.