On being home 6.3.21

With the title line from his poem, “There is no house like the house of belonging,” Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte captures the experience of a deeply authentic soul-home distinct from street address or physical dwellings. This image illustrates the “inside-out”/soul dimension of home consistent with Jung’s “capital-S self” in relationship with the self formed and adapted to function in the world.

On both news and psychological fronts “home” has particular power these days in literal and factual terms, as we collectively and individually emerge from the Year-+-of-COVID-19. A reader shared this apt and complementary take on this emergence by New York Times columnist David Brooks in his commencement speech at Boston College.

Psychologically the contrasts and dynamic tensions can be vivid and tangible between our “inside-out” felt-experience and the external daily realities. Two examples — which have even shown up polarized as partisan political lines in the sand — are the ubiquitous “home-as-refuge vs home-as-prison” and “the in-here vs out-there” strangeness of daily life in a mask. (These conflicts are of course intensified to drastic degree for the many on both the health care worker and the patient/family side of the pandemic.)

Through the wider lenses of thinkers not only in depth psychology but many other disciplines, few concepts of “the soul and where it lives” are more universal, across cultures, history, religions, literature and other art than the idea of soul-space being our deepest and most authentic of human dwellings.

Here one of my favorite longtime journalists who has long and mindfully covered depth psychology, Pythia Peay wrote this lovely article about Washington, DC as home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riots.

And for individuals the symbol and imagery of home as soul — our deepest “capital-S self” in the language of Jung’s depth psychology — show up in dreams, pop culture, and in everyday slang, as in “man, that hits me where I live.”

A wonky term alert: This kind of “inside-out” felt-experience is phenomenological, with phenomenology being our being aware of and observing the experience. It’s basically about becoming mindful of what’s going on while we are in-it.

It seems useful to note, here, that this and any serious pursuit or discussion of soul beyond the casual and cliched requires a psychology that includes and acknowledges the unconscious and imaginal dimensions of our experience and systems of meaning.