The passage to university education implies a major moment of modifying the relation to knowledge towards the end of the adolescent process. Knowledge is an object resulting from the reorganization of the drives of infantile sexuality (Freud, 1905/2001), according to the early relations that determine the figures of identification and the choice of object (Freud, 1914/2001). The oral, scopic and mastery drives participate in this process of drive derivation towards objects of knowledge inscribed by education in the social space and the field of culture (Klein, 1946; Lacan, 1949/1966; Mijolla-Mellor, 1992).

Two intertwined questions come into play in education: the more archaic of being, through assimilation of the object of knowledge, and the later of having, through its possession and mastery. On the one hand, the object of knowledge is, as partial object, incorporated and assimilated in the form of the archaic oral fantasy which for this reason modifies being through the introduction and transformation of the object in the subject. On the other hand, the model of specular identification introduces, later, relational possibilities to the other as a figure of knowledge, and no longer only with knowledge as a partial object. In that sense, university education engages the subject in imaginary scenes of confrontation with the demand and the desire of the other on the symbolic level.

In regard to this subjective process, the reorganization of the relation to knowledge required by the university education inevitably confronts the subject with a movement of separation from parents, close to the mourning of childhood objects, thus reactivating the traces of former conflicts and their corollary, anguish, in the dynamics of hate and love, aggressiveness, guilt and the desire of reparation (Freud, 1917/2001; Klein, 1940). Separation can be experienced then, not as a purely destructive loss, but rather as a transformation - and therefore as a survival - of the object and a re-articulation of the relationship to it, depending on the possibility of modifications of the early identificatory patterns through new identifications in social and pedagogical relationships.

This paper proposes to analyze this subjective process of separation related to higher education in the case of young students in migration situations. If for any student the entrance to the university symbolically signifies this process of separation, bringing into play repetitions and new possibilities of subjective reorganization, for migrant students in particular, the entrance to the university marks in a more radical way a crossing of boundaries and an experience of absence. Moreover, this situation entails a change of symbolic coordinates – linguistic, cultural and relational – that come to question the narcissistic bases and the identity contours of the subject. The departure, with its external tensions linked to the real separation, accentuates an internal tension reactivating often phantasmatic scenes of abandonment, breakdown or overflow (Winnicott, 1984/2011; Kattar 2011).

I propose to analyze the stakes of the relation to knowledge, and particularly how it reactivates the question of origins in the migrant student, an adolescent in the process of becoming a young adult, based on three cases of Colombian women aged between 19 and 20. In these cases, the entry into university studies implied a geographical, cultural and more or less linguistic migration. The material is derived from individual interviews conducted in two different research fields, both separate and connected in time and space: for the first two cases, in the framework of a reading and writing tutoring work with me as a trainer, structured according to a psychoanalytic approach, in a Colombian university some years ago; for the other case, in the framework of an individual therapeutic work engaged by a Colombian student in France with me as a psychologist. I thus occupied two different professional places in the encounter with these three women.

Through the contents of the interviews, I will highlight how the position of a learner as a foreigner leads often to situations of vulnerability and dependence that reactivate the fundamental fantasies of the subject. Thus, for example, family distance, even if desired in the name of studies, updates the history of the learner's family ties, potentially bringing to the surface, according to the singularity of each history, separation anxiety, feelings of loss, aggressiveness and guilt in the dynamics of the relationship to the other, through the infantile figures of the parents. This process, which is similar to mourning, requires the subject a psychic reorganization in order to face melancholia (in the form of nostalgia) and the temptation of regressive return to the mother or father. Each student thus puts in place different solutions - identificatory, sublimatory and amorous - which are specific to her or him.

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