Migratory grief and the object that did not die: ambiguous loss, individuation and the limits of the classical grief model

Abstract

This article examines migratory grief as a conceptual category in its own right, irreducible to the classical model of grief work. It begins from an observation that the literature on the subject frequently dissolves: the object lost in migration has not died. Land, language, family and landscape continue to exist, accessible by video call and photograph, and inaccessible as a lived world. This condition — simultaneous physical presence and psychic absence — renders inapplicable both the progressive decathexis described by Freud and the sequence of stages formulated by Kübler-Ross for grief following death. The argument mobilises Pauline Boss's notion of ambiguous loss and Joseba Achotegui's concept of migratory duel, situates migration as a crisis of the frame of reference by way of the Platonic allegory of the cave, and examines, with Jung, the hypothesis that displacement accelerates individuation by forcing a confrontation with shadow contents. It is argued that migratory grief is recurrent and not terminable by definitive elaboration, and that recognising it as such reorients care: the task is not to lead the subject to overcome a loss, but to sustain living alongside an absence that does not close.