salient, illustrating how cross-cultural passage further complicates the Oedipal drama

between the son and the father.

 Freud's interpretation seems to imply that whatever people fear and want to

repudiate, be it an atrocious crime of the past, a history of betrayal or a threatening object

or situation, they tend to assimilate it into themselves and perpetually recreate in a

different and distorted fashion. Interestingly, this assimilative recreation of the painful

past or trauma, in many cases, is closely related to multiple leave-takings and coming into

contact with ethnic, religious or cultural others. Thus, as Cathy Caruth maintains, what

we ultimately find in Freud's investigative narrative, as in many other parables of

psychoanalytic theory, is "the story of the way in which one's own trauma is tied up with

the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with

another."256

 The psychoanalytic or psychological studies by Antokoletz, the Grinbergs, and

Freud briefly reviewed above all suggest that some irretrievable loss happens in the

process of cross-cultural passage. They also point out that the loss, whatever kind it may

be, returns with a belated impact as a traumatic symptom, if it is not acknowledged or

mourned. Despite their valuable insight on the issue of cultural relocation, loss, and the

impact of an often delayed mourning, however, these various psychoanalytic researches

all have their own shortcomings. First, they use such concepts as loss, mourning, and

trauma in a fairly abstract manner. What they often overlook is the traumatogenic socio-

political structure surrounding a cross-cultural passage. For instance, although Antokoltz

astutely links the concept of a false self to the pressure of assimilation, she does not

particularly examine the specific intergroup dynamics which determine the form of