Homelessness and the problem of containment

Abstract

Homelessness is a problem that is hardly spared to any society in our modern world. Usually discussed by people concerned with social policy, sociology, public health and politics, homelessness has only quite recently begun to command the attention of professionals concerned with psychological and psychotherapeutic processes. Following from the author's experience of working therapeutically with homeless people, as well as in discussions with homeless services, the paper follows a line of thinking around homelessness that is explicitly psychodynamic in orientation. The central argument here is that homelessness is an experience that is, so to speak, waiting to happen. Homelessness is portrayed as a natural extension of an underlying experience of the sister states of uncontainment and alienation. I argue that the homeless person not only experienced a lack of containment in his earliest interactions, but has grown through life with significant difficulties in this area. Homelessness then is an extreme response to a deeper psychological reality that projects into a part of the person's life the agonies associated with uncontainment. Homelessness is the realization of an internal situation –a shifting of a personal struggle into a new and more visible stage. This view of homelessness is designed to provide an amendment to current views that privilege the roles of poverty and social exclusion in the origins of homelessness rather than as an alternative account of the origins of homelessness.

Keywords:

• homelessness
• containment
• ambivalence
• compulsion to repeat
• narcissistic wound
• alienation
• homelessness history
• new beginning

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the staff of the North Dublin Clinical Psychology Service and of the Clinical Psychology Training Programme, University of Dublin, Trinity College, for their support in completing this paper. I should also like to thank Alice Leahy, director of the Trust, and Geraldine Kane from the multidisciplinary homelessness team for their enthusiasm in thinking about homelessness from a variety of perspectives. The practical assistance given to me by Sarah Jamieson, Aisling White and Geraldine Kenny over the course of my work in this area is greatly appreciated.