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I was delighted to be asked to write a review essay of this book making links with my own publications as they pertain to the topic of homelessness and unhoused minds. When I first speculated about ‘a homeless state of mind’ I could not have imagined that 21 years later this topic would be explored in such fascinating depth.
Following the introduction of the National Health and Community Care Act 1990, the closure of large mental hospitals and the re-housing of their patients in local communities, I was employed by the Tavistock Clinic to work with a range of new and developing community mental health services. It was in this context, hearing about those people who were unable to live in their allocated homes, that I began to explore what lay behind elective homelessness. Infants who are not safely housed in the minds of their primary carers are deprived of the opportunity to internalise a good psychic home. For many of those previously housed in large mental hospitals, ‘home life’ felt unbearable in that it revived early traumas and, like many of the homeless today, having lost their institutional ‘mother’ homes, they drifted onto the streets thereby confronting the rest of us with their plight.
Vega Zagier Roberts and I wrote, ‘Homelessness is a political issue, a social issue and – in terms of the dynamics between the homeless and the housed – a psychological issue’ (1998, p. 30). In identifying some of the complexities, we noted that to hold in mind that which the client finds impossible to hold in mind can feel risky. ‘When we seek quick solutions, we are avoiding taking this risk by organising and controlling rather than connecting. We are afraid to connect: afraid that our minds will not be able to take the strain – not least because connection requires us to be in touch with our own homeless bits, those parts of our own minds that we do not wish to house. We are afraid that if we try to house them, our own mental homes/containers will collapse under the strain