Expat Anxiety: When Success Abroad Feels Like Failure Inside
Living and working abroad is often framed as a triumph—a bold leap into opportunity, career advancement, and personal growth. For many expatriates, the outward signs of success are visible: prestigious jobs, cosmopolitan lifestyles, financial security. And yet, beneath this polished exterior, a quieter truth may emerge: anxiety, alienation, and a gnawing sense of inner failure. How can life abroad feel so successful on the outside, yet provoke such deep internal unrest?
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this paradox can be understood as the collision between external adaptation and internal reality—a conflict often rooted in unconscious processes, early relational patterns, and the struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self across cultural dislocation.
The Dislocation of the Self
Relocating to a foreign country, especially under the banner of success, often requires a radical adaptation of identity. One must learn not only a new language or social code but also recalibrate one’s internal compass. In psychoanalytic terms, this can be experienced as a disruption to the continuity of the self (Winnicott, 1965).
The familiar “holding environment” of home—the people, places, and cultural cues that support a stable sense of self—may be lost. Without these psychic anchors, the expatriate can feel unmoored, leading to anxiety, depression, or a sense of derealization. While the ego may be functioning well externally, the true self may feel silenced, masked, or fragmented.
The Illusion of Mastery
The decision to work abroad often involves a fantasy of self-mastery—to rise above limitations, escape family entanglements, or prove one’s worth. Psychoanalysis teaches us that such fantasies often mask deeper unconscious conflicts. The move abroad can represent both a flight from dependency and an attempt to re-enact early struggles with autonomy.
The resulting anxiety may not stem from failure per se, but from the realization that even achievement on foreign soil cannot resolve internal ambivalence. Success, then, becomes hollow—not because it isn’t real, but because it was unconsciously expected to provide something it never could: psychic repair or affirmation of an idealized self.
The Ghosts of the Internalized Other
The experience of expatriate life often brings long-buried internal dynamics to the surface. Psychoanalysis views anxiety not just as a reaction to external stressors, but as an encounter with internal objects—introjected figures from childhood who carry the voices of criticism, judgment, or idealization.
Far from home, with the familiar context stripped away, these internalized others may grow louder. The success story abroad can activate the superego’s harsh demands: „You should be happy. You should be thriving.“ The incongruence between this voice and one’s actual emotional experience can deepen shame and isolation.
In such cases, success becomes a double bind: to fail would be to disappoint, but to succeed and still feel empty suggests that one is somehow deficient, defective, or ungrateful.
Cultural Dissonance and the Uncanny
Freud’s concept of the uncanny (das Unheimliche)—something simultaneously familiar and strange—offers another lens for understanding expat anxiety. Cultural dissonance may evoke feelings of uncanniness, particularly when the new environment triggers early childhood memories or traumas that have no conscious link to the present.
For example, a language barrier might unconsciously echo the preverbal helplessness of infancy. Or the idealization of the „foreign other“ may unconsciously reflect parental longing, displacement, or envy. These transferences can lead to heightened anxiety or depressive states, especially when unrecognized.
Working Through in the Analytic Space
Psychoanalytic therapy offers expatriates a space to explore these unconscious dynamics. The goal is not merely to adjust to a new culture, but to understand what has been stirred up internally by the relocation. Through the analytic process, patients can begin to articulate the unspeakable tensions between ambition and loss, mastery and vulnerability, external success and internal emptiness.
By exploring fantasies of escape, unresolved attachments, and the longing for coherence, the expat may begin to reintegrate the fragmented self—not by erasing the experience of dislocation, but by giving it symbolic meaning.
Conclusion: Success, Reimagined
Expatriate life is not only a cultural journey but a psychic migration. It holds the potential for growth, but also reactivates unresolved conflicts. The dissonance between external success and internal distress is not a failure—it is an invitation to deeper self-understanding. And in that understanding, there may be the possibility of genuine integration: not a perfect adaptation, but a more honest relationship with one’s inner world.
References
Freud, S. (1919). The Uncanny. Standard Edition, Vol. XVII.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. Hogarth Press.
Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. Columbia University Press.
Akhtar, S. (1995). A Third Individuation: Immigration, Identity, and the Psychoanalytic Process. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 43(4), 1051–1084.