Limbă, Literatură, Folclor

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52505/llf.2025.2.06

Abstract: The article offers a psychoanalytic exploration of the defense mechanisms triggered in exile, particularly political exile, viewed as a traumatic rupture in psychic organization. Exile generates deep identity tensions, activating primitive defenses such as splitting, projection, devaluation, or acting out. At the same time, it may become a paradoxical space for creativity and self-rewriting, through mature mechanisms like sublimation, humor, or reflective processing. Drawing on the biographies of Romanian exiled intellectuals and inventors (Coandă, Vuia, Cioran), the study illustrates how the psyche negotiates between loss and reconstruction. Exile is thus examined not merely as a crisis, but as a stage of becoming, where defense may initiate pathways to adaptation and symbolic creation.

Keywords: exile, defense mechanisms, splitting, identity, sublimation, symbolization, adaptation, creativity.