Need for shelter, demand for housing, desire for home: a psychoanalytic reading of home-making in Vancouver

Abstract

Home is often dually conceptualized as a physical space of living and a psycho-social place of belonging. To engage with this dual nature of home, housing scholars refer to the concept of ontological security to understand how different forms of housing affect subjective well-being. This paper extends the scope of this research. Developing a framework inspired by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we aim to understand what kind of psycho-spatial arrangements of home-making are involved in establishing ontological security. Based on empirical research in Vancouver, BC, Canada, we suggest three modalities involved in home-making: the need for shelter as the most basic psychic relation to survival, the demand for housing as a psycho-social arrangement with the Other, and the desire for home as a psycho-spatial constitution in the fantasy. Through this, the paper calls for a deeper understanding of how the subject is inscribed actively and dynamically into their social and built environment. 

Keywords:

• Home
• Housing
• Ontological Security
• Psychoanalysis
• Jacques Lacan
• Vancouver

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Miro Born and Carlotta Reh for conducting the interviews we refer to in this paper as well as Henning Füller, Ylva Kürten, Yannick Ecker and Carl-Jan Dihlmann for their support in implementing the research project ‘Geographic Imaginations: People’s Sense of Security and Insecurity in a Cross-Generational Comparison’ at the DFG-funded collaborative research center ‘Re-Figuration of Spaces’ (CRC 1265). We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing very helpful critiques and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 The concept of ‘dwelling’ is yet another approach which belongs to the realm of environmental psychology (Saegert, 1985). It has been further discussed in the field of housing studies (Coolen et al., 2002; Coolen & Meesters, 2012; King, 2004, 2005) to distinguish the psycho-spatial and fluid arrangements involved in the processes of home-making. Dwelling refers to a more processual notion of actively ‘doing’ and ‘making’ a home due to social and psychological transactions in order to gain a sense of identity and place in the world. As such, dwelling relates to the Lacanian approach developed in this paper, especially regarding the ‘desire for a home’. However, we decided to focus on the notions of shelter, housing, and home, because the interviewees in Vancouver referred explicitly to these terms in order to generate meaning about the psycho-spatial dimension of the self.

2 In his study on Jamaican tourism, Kingsbury (2010, pp. 525–526) mentions the Lacanian distinction between need, demand, and desire through a simple but intriguing example. He retraces how many interactions between service workers and hotel guests address certain needs (e.g. hunger or thirst) through articulated demands (e.g. cheese requirement), whereby the workers are not only present to satisfy the guests’ needs, but also, primarily, to take care of a certain surplus underlying these demands. The guests’ demand for food is not just a demand to satisfy their appetite, but a ‘demand for love’ expressed through the worker’s presence in the form of smiling attention and friendly conversation. For Kingsbury, it is here where we find desire at work.

3 While need is characterized by the fact that it exists independently of any social or symbolic relationship, it should be said that from the Lacanian perspective, it is, strictly speaking, impossible to consider need in its ‘pure’ form. After all, every subject is already marked by language and thus bound to what Lacan calls ‘the Other’, the realm of the socio-symbolic order. Therefore, Lacan (2017, p. 58) states: ‘Needs only come to us refracted, broken, and fragmented’. Need has to be understood as a quasi-natural category, a category that can only be retroactively conceived as existing prior to any other relationship with the world.

4 While our interviewees addressed the Other primarily in economic and political terms, as a figure that regulates access to housing from outside the household, we want to stress that the Other can also appear in more social terms within the household, for instance, male dominance and/or domestic violence can establish an Other who ensures whether access to shelter is granted, with direct implications for the ontological (in)security of other members of the household.

5 We only indirectly use Lacan’s concept of jouissance here, which goes beyond what it usually associated with the term ‘enjoyment’, and which is considered ‘one of the most important and ambiguous’ concepts of Lacanian theory (Kingsbury, 2005, p. 120).

6 The Ur-home has a spatial and a temporal dimension. It is stretched across time and differs due to age and other facets of intersectional identities, i.e., for those born in Vancouver or elsewhere in Canada, it can represent a former ‘way of living’ that has been lost due to more recent urban developments. In other cases, the Ur-home may well be stretched out primarily across space (rather than time). In particular for those who were born elsewhere, who immigrated to Canada and arrived in Vancouver, it represents the birthplace from which they departed and to which they can never (fully) return. The ‘motherland’ can never be reached, not because it is so incredibly different from the troubling reality we deal with every day, but because it is a retroactive product, established by its own loss, that never existed in the first place.

7 At this point, it is fruitful to mention the relation between a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of home-making and the ‘material turn’ in housing studies (Gabriel & Jacobs, 2008; Jacobs & Gabriel, 2013). As stated elsewhere (Pohl, 2020b), Lacanian theory is far from being indifferent about the material reality. However, in contrast to the material turn, Lacanian psychoanalysis is not interested ‘in the fact that objects can have effects that are independent of (and sometimes even contrary to) the explicit attitudes we have towards them or the meaning we consciously attach to them’ (Jacobs & Malpas, 2013, p. 284). Lacan rather allows us to address the fact that certain objects cannot be properly understood without taking into account the explicit attitudes we have towards them and the meaning we unconsciously attach to them. In other words, Lacanian psychoanalysis encourages us to understand why some objects (like houses) matter more than others.

8 Such an approach thus corresponds with the concept of affect as it ‘de-privileges the human as the reservoir of agency in world’ (Woodward & Lea, 2010, p. 157).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projektnummer 290045248 – SFB 1265.

Notes on contributors

Lucas Pohl

Lucas Pohl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geography of Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. He works for a research project on geographical imaginations of security and insecurity that is part of the Collaborative Research Centre “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265). He received his Ph.D. (2015-2020) at the Department of Human Geography of Goethe-University in Frankfurt with a dissertation thesis that elaborates on a psychoanalytic approach of urban ruination. More generally, he works on the interstices between urban cultural geography, psychoanalysis, and philosophy with a focus on social- and spatial theory, built environments, and political action. The latest results of his research have been published in cultural geographies, Social & Cultural Geography, and Theory, Culture & Society. He is part of the editorial board of sub\urban, a German journal for critical urban studies.

Carolin Genz

Carolin Genz is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Geography of Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany, and research associate in the Collaborative Research Centre “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265). Her Ph.D. (2015-2019) in Human Geography at Humboldt University of Berlin (funded by the German National Academic Foundation) focused on urban protest and network practices in the light of the housing crisis in Berlin and Toronto with a focus on elders. The ethnography has been published at Springer VS in the book series “City, Space and Society”. As an urban anthropologist in the intersecting fields of human geography and urban studies, she continually develops ethnographic methods to capture the socio-spatial constitution of urban practices. Moreover, she engages in research on urban transformation, housing, spatial theory, and resistance. She is co-founder of the International Research Group "Urban Ethnography Lab" (2013) and Academic Advisory Council for "Gender Mainstreaming and Diversity" for the Senate Department of Urban Development and Housing in Berlin (2015).

Ilse Helbrecht

Ilse Helbrecht is full professor of cultural and social geography (since 03/2009) at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. She has studied geography, sociology and public law at the University of Munster (diploma 1990) and received her Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) in 1993 and her habilitation (Dr. phil. Habil.) in 1999 at Technical University of Munich. Ilse Helbrecht has worked as Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (1994-1996) and senior researcher at the Technical University of Munich (1996-2002). In 2002 she was appointed full professor at the University of Bremen, where she also served as adjunct dean (2003-2004) and vice-president for academic affairs and international relations (2005-2008). She has received several awards and distinctions: e.g. Doctoral Dissertation Prize, Technical University of Munich (1993), Urban Studies Award City of Munich (1999), Nomination for the National Urban Design Award 2014 in Great Britain with the book publication Ilse Helbrecht/Peter Dirksmeier (Eds.) 2012, New Urbanism: Life, Work, and Space in the New Downtown, Ashgate Publishing; Caroline von Humboldt-Professorship 2019 in the framework of the German Excellence Initiative; Thomas-Mann-Fellow 2019 of the German Federal Government.

Janina Dobrusskin

Janina Dobrusskin is Ph.D. student at the Department of Geography of Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. As an associate of the Collaborative Research Center “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265), she conducts research in Germany and Singapore on the political role emotions and affects play in geographical imaginations. She finished her master degree in Urban Geography at Humboldt University Berlin and worked as a research assistant in initiating “Berlin’s Competence and Advice Centre against Discrimination on the Housing Market”. She is part of the editor’s collective kollektiv orangotango+ that published “This is not an Atlas. A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies” in 2018. In her research, she works on critical urban geography (social inequalities, housing, urban governance), migration, border regimes, and feminist geography.