The Psychology Of Home: An Archetypal Study Of Relationship To Place

Abstract

Home is a powerful archetype. Next to Mother, it is probably the most universal and powerful archetype that we experience. What makes a place a “home,” or us feel at home? In our increasingly mobile society, this examination is critical. The rise in adult depression and anxiety in the United States may be directly related to the primal need for home. The dis-ease of feeling disconnected or unmoored is suppressed by a slew of temporary comforts, slick advertising, and self-help suggestions that ultimately only deepen our longing for familiarity and belonging.

This theoretical dissertation determines the adult experience of home as predicated on our experience as a child. Uninhibited and unsupervised play during the formative years of youth is essential for the development of place attachment, imprinting a landscape, specific house, even smells and tastes that become definitively associated with “home” as an adult. The archetypal energies of Mother, Father, and Greek deities embodied in our primary caregivers additionally determine our experience of home when young, facilitating an expectation that becomes embedded in our psyches. A plethora of literary and cinematic examples illustrate the pervasiveness of these archetypal influences. Additionally, Jungian and post-Jungian analysis identify home as an emotional and psychological experience, often manifested in personifying and pathologizing: both psychic representations of relationship to home.

Leaving home is necessary for our full appreciation of all it offers and provides. Moreover, a separation that includes emotional isolation and homesickness is essential to individuation. Joseph Campbell identified this as the hero’s journey, a process that calls us out into the world to discover our potential and power, successfully fulfilled with a return home or to an altogether new place that becomes home. While such a journey may occur more than once, only with awareness and engagement of the internal child are we able to experience a soulful connection that allows us to feel rooted in the world, wherever we are.