What determines the feeling of being at home and, its counterpart, the condition of the uprooted self?
We live in an era in which homelessness is not limited to street dwellers or the less economically solvent population.
Mass migrations and deportations, bombings of civilian homes, physical and emotional abuse, evictions, undermine the home and deprive human beings of the possibility of feeling at home.
Furthermore, our planet—which is the material condition of the experience of being at home—is on the verge of becoming uninhabitable.
“The most serious thought of our time confronts the feeling of homelessness,” Susan Sontag reflected back in 1963. Where, then, are we at home?
Can a homeless person
live
on the street, under the contemptuous gaze of some or the indifference of others, hungry and cold, expelled from public places?
Can we say that we
live
in a refugee camp?
Living in adverse conditions reveals that there is more than one way to be at home somewhere and that, despite everything, those who are homeless manage, organize, help and care for themselves and others.
Still, many die trying or are left on the sidelines, women and children, like the migrants at the Texas border, who have decided that adopting a new home would outweigh the dangers of staying where they are.
“It is enough to move house once or twice in your life to be able to imagine, without too much difficulty, the destructive effects caused by the loss of spatial and temporal markers.
It is no longer just psychology that is at stake in the situation of homelessness, but directly the sense of relationship, identity and being," writes anthropologist Marc Augé in his book Diary
of a Homeless Man,
in which he narrates the Henri's pilgrim existence on the outskirts of Paris.
During the day he wanders the streets, talks, frequents cafes, but at night he takes refuge in an uninhabited house.
We witness his loss of orientation, the degeneration of his ability to relate, and the progressive erosion of his identity.
The text reveals that we live in geographical spaces in which domicile patterns radically affect 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,
stressed in his book
Citadel
the importance of the notion of dwelling.
“I have discovered a great truth,” he writes, which is “that humans inhabit and that the meaning of things changes for them according to the meaning of the house.”
We need a center to which our spatial relationships refer, a place where we live, where we are at home and to which we can virtually always return.
Even more so now, in a world in which living is inseparable from 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 a kind of GPS, so to speak. —In 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, that is, nowhere—which is precisely the mark of our alienation—we run the risk of uprooting. and to become eternal fugitives.
Freud describes it as a state of psychic homelessness.
Finding that center is a challenge and its existence cannot be taken for granted, we must create it ourselves and take care of its integrity.
It is an essential task, and we will only accomplish it if we confront the fact that, for many, not having a roof over their heads represents the fundamental condition of the problem, as well as the ideal means to remedy it.
Although it is not simply a matter of accommodation: it is the internal relationship we have with our house that allows it to provide us with security.
Still, the problem can be solved by providing decent housing to those who lack it.
Thus, living 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—as a projection of our innermost being—that fosters meaning and uniqueness in the world.
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his book
The Poetics of Space,
dedicates extensive research to the “primitive function of living” as he sees it incorporated in the house, a place of material and symbolic anchorage that has its roots in the past and is extends towards the 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.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_