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What a distinctive pleasure it is to open a psychoanalytic book these days and be met by an author whose project it is to plumb the depths. Roger Kennedy does not offer us explanations or answers, but instead asks us to consider some of the most basic questions regarding what it means to be
human. His ambition is to consider what it is like to dwell in an interior psychic space—what psychoanalysts and some others would call having an inner life. In an age increasingly being taken over by technology, where psychology and psychiatry (at least in North America) are being thought in terms of efficiency, production, corporate goals, and chemical control, Kennedy reintroduces psychoanalysts to art and literature, to philosophy, architecture, and to religious notions of the soul. It is like coming home.
The notion of home frames this book in serious ways, both concrete and metaphorical. Kennedy asks us to consider the necessity of a home as a place of safety, consistency, and comfort. His survey of the importance of home touches on Bowlby and Winnicott, as might be expected, but also on Homer's myth of Odysseus, on architectural theory having to do with interior spaces, and on the poet-philosopher Bachelard, who wrote:
There is ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul …. Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are “housed.” Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms,” we learn to “abide” within ourselves. [Bachelard quoted by Kennedy, p. 14]
Kennedy develops these themes, teaching the reader a great deal about the historical emergence of private spaces in domestic dwellings from the seventeenth century to the present, and how these relate to trends in conceiving of individual subjects as having private interior spaces—intimate spaces about which one could become self-conscious.
Once the home (and the reconceived individual mind) was conceptualized as private and walled off into special and sometimes secret places