The Psychology of Home

To have a house, a flat, an apartment or other permanent dwelling is seen as a fundamental part of life, and a fundamental part of life that is often taken for granted until it is threatened or taken away from us. The majority of us are afforded the opportunity to select the type of building we choose to live in, where that building is located (within certain restrictions of budget and commuting time), and with whom we choose to live.

However, for those with support needs (such as those with moderate to severe learning disabilities, on-going mental health problems, and the homeless), such choices may not be readily available. Three main forms of housing exist for adults of working age who need on-going care and support. First, there is an option for such an individual to remain in the family home and to rely on the care of parents, and in certain circumstances outside agencies. Second, is for individuals with these needs to be placed into institutional style care, including hospital stays, or to be placed in nursing or residential homes. The third option, is to for the individual to be moved into independent specialised supported living accommodation in which they have their own front door, a place to call ‘home’. Home is something more problematic than having a house, and can often be difficult for someone to achieve. To understand fully the notion of home requires a delve into philosophical and psychological literature to fully explore a complex, multifaceted and dynamic issue.

So what is home? Freud (1919) argues that at the basis of our experience is a desire for stability and certainly in as many aspects of life as we can possibly achieve. Without this stability we are open to experiencing ‘the uncanny’ – a sense of feeling that something is missing within life, this ultimately leads to levels of psychological and subconscious distress that will result in negative psychological wellbeing. Expanding on this notion, Kennedy (2014) suggest that there exists an orthogonal dichotomy between the constructs of house and psychological homeliness. The former of these refers to the physical reality of being in a house or not, the later refers to the psychological reality of feeling ‘homed’ or not. That is, psychological homeliness refers to the extent to which one feels that they have a home, a place to call their own, and a sense of belonging. Within Kennedy’s model it is possible to by physically homeless but have psychological homeliness (as demonstrated in the narrative account of an itinerant homeless person in New Zealand cfHodgetts et al, 2010), and it is equally possible to by physically homed but to feel psychologically homeless. Indeed, as Kantor, Brozik and Dull (2019) have demonstrated those who are in temporary homeless accommodation and those who are in private rented accommodation record similar levels of psychological homelessness. Therefore, something exists within both shared accommodation and temporary accommodation that fails to promote a sense of psychological homeliness. If home and homeliness is understood from a psychological perspective we enter into a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between actor and object in which the object (house) becomes the embodied environment through which the actor (occupier) can play our their affective, behavioural and cognitive role. Each of these three elements, by necessity, co-exist within the consciousness of an individual and will influence the extent that psychological homeliness is manifested. Home can be understood as a haven in which the actor is offered the opportunity to experience privacy, privatism and ultimately privatisation of the self (Mallet).

The privacy of home refers to the ability to live without fear of surveillance and external role expectation (such as the performance of the role of patient, service user or homeless person), privatism affords the ability to withdraw from communal life to centre on personal activities, while privatisation understands the importance of privately owned accommodation against the backdrop of increasingly state owned properties (such as hospitals and care homes). With this triad in place, the home can become a place in which one learns to be at home, to ‘do home’ as a stative verb, rather than home as a noun (Mallett, 2004). This raises the challenge as to what being-at-home means. This being-at-home is done within both the physical and psychological space occupied by both building and person. The building becomes an embodied experience, the house becomes ‘my home’, windows become avenues to explore the outside world, and front-doors become a way to block the outside world and the pressures associated through the dynamic construction of the ‘ought and should’ self; in this way home becomes at-one-ment. But the merging of physical and psychological space is encountered through the narratives created in the rooms occupied.

The home becomes a place in which each room affords an opportunity to experience the different aspects of independent and self-fulfilled living – to sleep, to cook, to eat, to bathe, to construct a sense of self. These elements are not necessarily available in shared or temporary spaces. The physical spaces also afford this construction of a sense of self through the externalisation of a personal narrative through the physical representation of decor. H urdley talks of the symbolism associated with objects displayed on the mantelpiece in the home, and how these have attributed with them memories, feelings and emotions of experiences and people from the past.

The choice of decor, furniture, objects, books and pictures across the home demonstrate our interaction with that space along the six main ambient domains of restoration, kinship, storage, stimulation, intimacy and productivity (Graham et al, 2015). The physical space, therefore, reflects our affective interaction with it. While these objects become an external manifestation of our internal-space ambiences, they also offer a psychologically reinforcing dynamic through which our emotional interaction with home is solidified to establish ontological security. This ontological security ensures that the space we are in offer those resources we require to ward off the sense of the uncanny, these resources being constancy, daily routines, privacy and a secure base for identity construction (Padgett, 2007). However, as Newton (2008) argues, this ontological security (and the sense of psychological wellbeing this creates) are only fully realised when a person is able to be located in their house and in their home in a secure and stable way. Home then becomes the stage from which an actor is able to develop and express their internalised self in an externalised way, and becomes an extended embodied sense of self.

Home is constructed through a constant dialogue between physical and psychological space. For those who are vulnerable, home can become a place where interaction with medical ‘other’ can take place, leaving them open and vulnerable to loosing identity and security (de Witt et al, 2009) and leaving them in a position in which a house can be perceived as a ‘non-home’ (Annison, 2000). In the opening paragraph, three potential housing options are available for those who require additional support needs. Based on the argument presented above it is the contention of this paper that the first two options, while appropriate in certain situations, do not offer a person the ability to develop a sense of psychological homeliness or ‘being-at-homeness’. However, with the correct support the third option of independent specialised supported housing can offer these opportunities in along two different aspects. The first aspect dealing with the physical notion of house. These are properties that are developed to be secure, safe and appropriately designed for inhabitation. The second aspect is through the development of environments in which a person can be supported to develop a feeling of ‘being-at-home’, in order to be able to construct, develop and explore a personal narrative of self through that physical and psychological space, and to utilise the ambient dimensions at their disposal to enrich and enhance their ontological security.

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