“I’m Happy” (On Immigration and Exile)

A psychoanalyst of Argentine origin, long settled in Paris, explores the psychic afterlife of immigration and exile. Taking its title from an old refugee’s joke—happy, yes, but nicht glücklich, not truly happy—the article circles a fantasy common to the displaced: the wish to collapse distance and time, to keep two worlds, and two selves, simultaneously present. It moves associatively through patients’ accounts, half-remembered films, and frozen expatriate dialects, resisting the pull to resolve this fantasy into theory, staying instead inside the very unfinishedness it describes.