Epilogue: HOME

As I was preparing this issue and treating Dr. L. thoughts about home and its meanings suffused our work together. Dr. L., orphaned by age 6, moved away from her country of origin to attend university. She married an American, remained in her adopted country, where the culture and language remained foreign, never feeling like home. She often describes how essentially homeless she feels and yet no place ever feels completely like home, including her country of origin. Her primary sense of home dwells in the experience of being with her daughter and speaking together in her mother tongue. Unlike the rootlessness of one sibling and the rootedness of another who remained in his home country and married a spouse from the same culture, my patient’s primary relationship with her adoptive country remains that of an outsider and a subversive, a position that has provided both a critical, ethical perspective (an asset in her work) as well as a depriving, ever yearning inclination. Despite her abiding childhood wish to live in a home imbued with a strong feeling of domestic coziness, it was only after a major renovation of her present home, approaching this task by becoming a fully participating partner in choreographing the space, involved in every decision, that her current home has felt more aesthetically pleasing and thus more “like home.”

Upon reading my remarks, Dr. L comments, “The renovation restored, on a very cellular level, some powerful aspects of my material environment when I was little, embedded pieces of the material world of my childhood e.g., bigger windows and more light, balcony with flowers, Greek marble in the bathroom, adobe wall texture in the back of the house, rhododendron, rose bush, wild native plants, no lawn, etc.”

Was something destroyed? created? re-created? Did the interplay between her vision of home and greater agentic activity culminate in a feeling of greater possession (“mineness”)?

Dr. L. explains. “Yes. I think that, in my case at least, th