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This article seeks to analyze the collective psychic processes at work in the handling of the migrant crisis in Europe. Indeed, the speeches and actions of European leaders (and to some extent also the populations they govern) reflect important paradoxes, from the sense of responsibility for others to identitarian decline. These defense mechanisms are comparable to the paranoid-schizoid position described by Melanie Klein. We will first study this divide, of which the migratory crisis is the object, and then the question of the death of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, in order to illustrate the capacity to reach a depressive position of those who, as close as possible to the humanitarian catastrophe, decide to take responsibility for their funerals, raising death as the last bastion of dignity owed to other humans.