Homelessness is a physical and mental state

What defines the feeling of being at home and, its counterpart, the condition of the uprooted self? We live in an era in which homelessness is not limited to people living on the street, or to the economically destitute. Mass migration and deportation, bombings of civilian dwellings, physical and emotional abuse, evictions and other violent disruptions undermine housing security and deprive people of the possibility of feeling at home. In addition, our planet — the primary material condition necessary for the experience of being at home — is itself on the verge of becoming uninhabitable. “Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness,” wrote Susan Sontag, as early as 1963. Where, then, are we at home?

Can a homeless person truly live on the street, under the contemptuous gaze of some and the indifference of others? Hungry and cold, expelled from public spaces? Can we say that one lives in a refugee camp? Living in adverse conditions shows us that there is more than one way to be at home, and that, in spite of everything, those who are homeless still manage to work, organize, support and care for themselves and for others. Still, many die or are left stranded on the sidelines of society, including women and children. Like the migrants at the Texas border, for example, who have decided that risking everything to find a new home outweighs the dangers of staying where they are.

“You have only to have moved house once or twice in your life to be able to imagine, without too much difficulty, the destructive effects wrought by the loss of spatio-temporal markers. It is no longer just psychology that is at stake in the situation of the homeless, but, directly, the sense of relationship identity and being,” writes anthropologist Marc Augé in his book No Fixed Abode, a fictional ethnography in which he recounts a man named Henri’s transient existence on the outskirts of Paris. By day, Henri wanders the streets, converses, frequents cafés, but at night takes refuge in an abandoned house. We witness his loss of orientation, the degeneration of his ability to relate to others, and the progressive erosion of his identity. The text shows that we live in geographical spaces in which the patterns of habitation radically affect our status and our inner being.

To feel at home, it is not enough merely to exist in the world; we must inhabit it. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, stressed the importance of this notion of inhabiting, writing in a different book, Citadel: “For I have lit on a great truth: to wit, that all men dwell, and life’s meaning changes for them with the meaning of the home.” We need a center to which our spatial relations refer: a place where we dwell, where we are at home, and to which we can always return. Even more so now, in a world in which dwelling is inseparable from the question of mobility, our home is closely and complexly linked in our psyche to the spaces through which we wander — it is a kind of GPS, so to speak. On the other hand, there are homes to which one does not want to return, not even in one’s mind, lying on the psychoanalyst’s couch.

Whether because of adverse circumstances or because, in an increasingly homogeneous world, floating in the clouds of the internet, we are at home everywhere — which is to say, nowhere (and precisely the cause of our alienation) — we run the risk of being uprooted and becoming eternal fugitives. Freud describes this condition as a form of psychic homelessness. Finding that center is a challenge, and its existence cannot be taken for granted: we must create it ourselves and cultivate and care for its integrity. This is an essential task, which we can only accomplish if we confront the fact that, for many, homelessness represents the fundamental condition of the problem, as well as the ideal conduit to remedy it. But it is not simply a matter of housing: it is a question of the internal relationship we have with our home, which allows this space to provide us with a sense of security. Even so, the problem can be solved by providing decent housing for those who lack it.

Thus, dwelling here is no longer a random activity like any other, but an essential part of human nature and our relationship with the world, and with ourselves. It must be understood as an active principle — as a projection of our innermost being — that brings meaning and uniqueness to the world. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his book The Poetics of Space, devotes extensive research to the primitive function of dwelling as he sees it embodied in the house: a place of material and symbolic anchorage that has its roots in the past while extending into the future through projects, aspirations or dreams: “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace,” he writes.

David Dorenbaum is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

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