Psychoanalysis of the Excommunicated

Abstract

This essay examines singular traumas suffered by Tibetan refugees and expedient and culture-specific cures for the same. Drawing on Honey Oberoi Vahali’s Lives in Exile and other ethnographic studies of the Tibetan community in Dharamsala, India, it shows how classic trauma theory can be revised and expanded by including the vocabulary and symptomatology of the sufferance of exile and homelessness by displaced Tibetans.