This paper aims to debate relations between culture and psychological reactions of individuals exposed to the process of migration and to establish relations between migration and psychosomatic sickening. The methodological approach is essentially qualitative and based on social representations of migrant patients, staff and professionals of a public health unit near Campinas. The analysis demonstrated that migration was negatively experienced as producing ailments when loss of job/income, break of family/community ties was involved. When these elements were stabilized, stressful factors of daily life remained covered (out of conscience) and worsening in health condition was attributed neither to migration nor to life quality. The problem of migration and ailments, from the health center perspective, involved merely biological procedures and did not include additional perspectives to help patients to assimilate their new life conditions in a new social environment.
Social Psychology; psychosomatics; migration; psychoanalysis; social medicine