Our relationship with ‘home’ includes many psychosomatic realms: perception, imagination, fantasy, projection, separateness, boundaries, smells, and sounds. Our very first home is our mother’s womb; our very last, an urn or coffin. In between, we have our childhood home, deeply incorporated into our psyche, which persists, throughout life, as (hopefully) a fond prototype, an object of nostalgia, and a source of ego-replenishment, college dorms, shared housing, apartments, marital and family homes, downsized residences of late middle age, retirement homes, nursing homes, and hospices. Far apart from a world of linear progression are traumatizing homes, foster homes, and orphanages where searingly painful as well as defiantly triumphant scenarios of growth and development may unfold. Also, monasteries, which embody the human desire for detachment, silence, and contemplation, away from earthly relations to seek spirituality and transcendence.
The contributions from Aisha Abbasi, Salman Akhtar, Rajiv Gulati, M. Nasir Ilahi, Gurmeet S. Kanwal, Murad Khan, Milan Patel, Sarita Singh, and Nidhi Tewari seek to demonstrate that at each step in the life span, our dwellings both impact upon and reflect our intrapsychic goings-on. As well as examinations of the kinds of home mentioned above, the abstract nature of home is also explored, looking at its function, the search for a sense of home, homesickness, absence, nostalgia, and the development of a stable internalized home. There’s no place like home and Attics and Basements shows us why.
Rajiv Gulati, MD, is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) and maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in Brooklyn. Born in New Delhi, Dr. Gulati has a strong interest in the ways in which culture inflects the experience of selfhood and crops up in the normative discourses that police gender and sexuality. He coedited the book, Eroticism (2021), with Dr. Salman Akhtar. He was the recipient, with coauthor David Pauley, of the APsA Committee on Gender and Sexuality’s 2020 Ralph Roughton Paper Award for “Reconsidering Leonardo Da Vinci and a memory of his childhood,” published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Joseph Fernando, MD Training and Supervising Analyst, Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, author of ‘A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Trauma’ –
‘This wide-ranging and profound book on homes and other human dwellings is well worth a read and a re-read. It is comprehensive in what it covers: childhood homes, marital homes, nostalgia for lost homes, orphanages, retirement homes, monasteries, and much more. Along with such breadth, the book delves deeply, through historical reportage and psychoanalytic deconstruction, into the external realities it considers and the internal state of affairs they embody and represent.’
Ann Smolen, PhD Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, author of ‘Six Children: The Spectrum of Child Psychopathology and Its Treatment’ –
‘From the womb to the cemetery, this timely book explores the multiple facets of home. The three-year-old girl plays house, acting out all the characters in her family. The oedipal child makes forts out of pillows and blankets. The latency child decorates the room with multiple collections, dreams of growing up, and the adolescent isolates herself in her room where fantasies of leaving and building one’s own home seem both exciting and terrifying. This book contains all this and much more. It is extremely important at a time when so many in our country might lose their homes!’
Dr. Julian Stern, Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, London, UK, Former Director, Adult and Forensic Services, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust –
‘Attics and Basements explores the multi-layered meanings of the notion of “home,” from our bodily beginnings in the womb and infancy to the challenges of old age and death, from the development of a sense of internal stability to existential threats. The book explores actual physical locations, the challenges of homelessness, and the notion of a secure base. In addition, the volume is infused with poetry, both in the use of language in the chapters themselves, and in the multiple references to poets and their creations – Rumi, Bachelard, T. S. Eliot, and Akhtar himself. This is a gem of a book, a pleasure both to read and digest.’