A Multitude in the Room: Exploring Immigrants’ Self-States and Their Intersecting Identities | April 26, 2025

An individual’s sense of self is not a cohesive and monadic structure, but entails a plurality of “selves” with varying degrees of continuity and integration. This is what Psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg refers to as “self-states.” In the encounter with a new land and a new culture, the immigrant patient comes to inhabit multiple “self-states,” some of which are rooted in pre-migratory identities, and others are developed in the encounter with the new culture. In the immigrant patient, some of these self-states may speak different languages, belong to different social classes and have different gender expressions. This workshop aims at introducing clinicians with tools to help immigrant patients connect and integrate with their multiple selves using the lens of intersectionality.

Maria Laguna (she/her/ella) is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. She is a former faculty member and current clinical supervisor at the Metropolitan Center for Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (MITPP.) Maria co-authored the book “From Grad School to Private Practice: a Roadmap for Mental Health Clinicians” (2023), and a book chapter: Exploring Immigrant’s Self-States from an Intersectionality Lens: Finding Liberation in the“In-Between” (in press, Nomos Verlag). Maria is the founder of Bicultural Collective, a virtual space that offers resources and support for clinicians and patients from multicultural backgrounds. She has taught immigration classes for multiple Universities (NYU, Columbia University, Mercy College).

Learning objectives | After this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Identify unconscious fantasies and defense mechanisms that are mobilized as a result of immigration.

•  Be introduced to the concept of “self-states” and the way they manifest in the immigrant patient.


• Explore the importance of using an intersectionality lens to engage and facilitate integration of patient’s multiple selves.

Recommended readings (Optional)

1. Boulanger, G. (2015). Seeing double being double: longing belonging recognition and evasion in psychodynamic work with immigrants. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 287–303. https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2015.27
2. Bromberg, P. M. (1998). Standing in the spaces: Essays on clinical process, trauma, and dissociation. Analytic Press.
3. Grinberg L., Grinberg R, Festinger N. & Kernberg O. F. (1989). Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile. Yale University Press.