Attics and Basements

The Evocative, Expressive and Embracing Functions of Homes and Other Human Dwellings

Attics and Basements investigates all manner of homes. Its approach is fundamentally psychoanalytic but borrows significantly from anthropology, history, architecture, religion, and general psychiatry. This rich mixture results in a deep understanding of the intertwined relationship between one’s internal world and external reality.

Our relationship with ‘home’ includes many psychosomatic realms: perception, imagination, fantasy, projection, separateness, boundaries, smells, and sounds. Our very first home is our mother’s womb; our very last, an urn or coffin. In between, we have our childhood home, deeply incorporated into our psyche, which persists, throughout life, as (hopefully) a fond prototype, an object of nostalgia, and a source of ego-replenishment, college dorms, shared housing, apartments, marital and family homes, downsized residences of late middle age, retirement homes, nursing homes, and hospices. Far apart from a world of linear progression are traumatizing homes, foster homes, and orphanages where searingly painful as well as defiantly triumphant scenarios of growth and development may unfold. Also, monasteries, which embody the human desire for detachment, silence, and contemplation, away from earthly relations to seek spirituality and transcendence.

The contributions from Aisha Abbasi, Salman Akhtar, Rajiv Gulati, M. Nasir Ilahi, Gurmeet S. Kanwal, Murad Khan, Milan Patel, Sarita Singh, and Nidhi Tewari seek to demonstrate that at each step in the life span, our dwellings both impact upon and reflect our intrapsychic goings-on. As well as examinations of the kinds of home mentioned above, the abstract nature of home is also explored, looking at its function, the search for a sense of home, homesickness, absence, nostalgia, and the development of a stable internalized home. There’s no place like home and Attics and Basements shows us why.

Contributor: Salman Akhtar (Edited by), M. Nasir Ilahi (Edited by), Rajiv Gulati (Edited by)

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