This issue is dedicated to thinking about home, in all of its meanings, affects, narratives, sensations, relationships, connections, physical manifestations, landscapes, temporal dimensions, cultural referents, symbolism, aesthetics, languages, both native and acquired, brokenness, yearnings, memories, traumas, and absence. The contributions contained in this issue engage, enliven and give voice to all of these components.
The authors address the range of elements promoting emotional dwelling and those leading to its disruption. They include the impact of changing the material aspects of personal and professional homes; the various pathways – language, books, and music, for example – by which children relate to feeling at home and that also facilitates leaving home; the physical and psychological influences of being enriched by multicultural and multilingual homes with often attendant feelings of profound dislocation; and the powerful, ever-reverberating aftermath of traumatic losses of home through divorce, the Holocaust and death of a sibling, often resulting in feeling states of homesickness, homelessness or brokenness.
The philosopher most often cited in addressing this subject is Bachelard (Citation1994) in his brilliant Poetics of Space. Bachelard explains, “All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home … One … experiences the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams. An entire past comes to dwell in a new house … We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images” (pp. 5–6).
Sandra G. Hershberg, M.D.
Issue Editor
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sandra G. Hershberg
Sandra G. Hershberg, M.D., is a psychoanalyst and adult and child psychiatrist. She is the Director of Psychoanalytic Training, Founding Member and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Washington, DC. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, where she received an award for excellence in teaching in 2019. Dr. Hershberg is a Geographical Supervising Analyst at the St. Louis Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center. She is a Clinical Associate Professor at Georgetown University Medical School and serves on the Program Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Hershberg is an Associate Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Self and Context and is on the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry.
Dr. Hershberg has published and presented papers on a variety of subjects including biography and psychoanalysis, pregnancy and creativity, therapeutic action, ethics, and the mother/daughter relationship. Her most recent papers include Mothering a Child with a Visible Facial Difference: The Gaze of the Mother and the Gaze of the Other and A Female Gaze in/on the Female Body in Art and Psychoanalysis: Paula Modersohn-Becker. Dr. Hershberg is the Co-Editor and a contributor to the book Psychoanalytic Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice: Reading Joseph D. Lichtenberg published by Routledge in 2016. In 2021, she co-edited an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry entitled Writing a New Playbook: Confronting Theoretical and Clinical Challenges of the Twin Pandemics of COVID-19 and Systemic Racism.
Reference
- Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space. Beacon Press.