What determines the feeling of home and thus the state of the uprooted self? We live in a time when homelessness is not limited to street dwellers or the economically less able population. Mass migrations and deportations, bombings of civilian homes, physical and mental abuse, and displacement undermine the home and deprive people of the opportunity to feel at home. Furthermore, our planet – which is the material prerequisite for the experience of home – is on the verge of becoming uninhabitable. “The most serious thought of our time is the feeling of homelessness,” thought Susan Sontag back in 1963. Where are we at home?
Can a homeless person live on the streets, under the contemptuous gaze of some or the indifference of others, hungry and cold, driven away from public places? Can we say we live in a refugee camp? Living in adverse conditions shows that there is more than one way to be at home somewhere and that despite everything, homeless people care for, organize, help and care for themselves and others. Still, many die trying or are left behind, women and children, like the migrants at the Texas border who decided that adopting a new home would outweigh the dangers of staying where they are.
“It is enough to move once or twice in a lifetime to be able to imagine without too much difficulty the destructive effects caused by the loss of spatial and temporal markers. “In the situation of homelessness, it is no longer just psychology that is at stake, but directly the sense of relationship, identity and being,” writes the anthropologist Marc Augé in his book “Diary of a Homeless Man,” in which he tells of Henri’s pilgrimage Outskirts of Paris. During the day he wanders the streets, talks, visits cafes, but at night he takes refuge in an uninhabited house. We experience his loss of orientation, the decline of his ability to relate and the progressive erosion of his identity. The text reveals that we live in geographical spaces in which residential habits radically influence our status and our inner being.
To locate ourselves, it is not enough to be in the world, we must inhabit it. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of “The Little Prince,” emphasized the importance of the term “dwelling” in his book “Citadel.” “I have discovered a great truth,” he writes, “that people live in them and that the meaning of things for them changes according to the meaning of the house.” We need a center to which our spatial relationships relate, a place where we live, where we are at home and to which we can practically always return. All the more, in a world where living is inextricably linked to the question of mobility, the substrate of the house in our psyche is closely and diversely linked to the spaces through which we wander, it is, so to speak, a kind of GPS. – With all this, there are houses to which one does not want to return, not even from the psychoanalyst's couch.
Whether due to adverse circumstances or because we are at home everywhere in an increasingly homogeneous world, floating in the Internet cloud, i.e. nowhere – which is precisely the sign of our alienation – we run the risk of uprooting ourselves and becoming eternal refugees. Freud describes it as a state of psychological homelessness. Finding this center is a challenge and its existence cannot be taken for granted. We must create it ourselves and ensure its integrity. It is an essential task that we can only accomplish if we face the fact that, for many, the lack of a roof over their heads is the underlying condition of the problem and, at the same time, the ideal means of solving the problem. It's not just about accommodation: it's the inner relationship we have with our house that gives us security. However, the problem can be solved by providing adequate housing to those who lack it.
Thus, life here is no longer a random activity like any other, but an essential aspect of human nature in our relationship with the world and with ourselves. It should be understood as an active principle – a projection of our innermost being – that gives meaning and uniqueness promotes in the world. In his book The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard devotes himself to extensive research into the “primitive function of dwelling” as he sees it embodied in the house, a place of material and symbolic anchoring that has its roots in the past and is expanding in this direction Future through projects, aspirations or dreams: “The house welcomes the dream, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
David Dorenbaum is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
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