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The impact of one's home has naturally become my major preoccupation, based on my personal experience of living as an expat in New York for almost 17 years. But perhaps home has become especially significant for all of us collectively during our required home stay due to coronavirus. I believe that, based on this shared experience of having to stay at home and probably retreating to our own “internalized” home, we can all find valuable insights in this timely book.
Kennedy at times writes as if he is free-associating on the concepts he is developing, which provides a natural flow to reading the book and helps the reader to engage with
the ideas from multiple controversial perspectives. The book is a mixture of reflection and integration of diverse disciplines (philosophy, religion, sociology, psychology, literature, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis) that leads to an expansion of ideas. He brings together works of art, personal and clinical experience, philosophical contemplation, psychoanalytic exploration and even architecture with what feels like a lively and sophisticated conversation. And yet, at certain parts of the book, especially when he discussed loneliness and happiness, I felt that he did not make enough use of the “psychic home” construct despite its unifying potential.
In the opening chapter, which is entitled “A home for the soul”, Kennedy describes home first and foremost as a place where one can be emotionally nurtured in addition to physically sustained – a place where one can “develop an organizing and sustaining psychic structure” (2), which he terms a “psychic home”. From various perspectives Kennedy explores the crucial position of this original construct and seems to use “psychic” and “soul” interchangeably in this quest (based on the Greek roots of the word “psyche”). According to the author, the word “soul”, the realm of the inner world, captures the fundamental qualities of being human. Although it is an elusive concept to define, Kenn