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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 (1994) 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
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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 Contempora