This issue of Reinventing Home explores the role of play as our nation—and the world—emerges from a great pandemic. Our message: After two years in lockdown, we need joy, delight, and a dose of make-believe in order to feel whole again.
Three new offerings from our creative partners at SoulAtPlay—join us for an exploration of the Fool as the key to new beginnings; Music as means of exploring your emotions; and Theatre improv as a way of staying sane in an uncertain world.
Reinventing Home is pleased to bring you a series of interviews on home as sanctuary from SoulAtPlay, a platform that connects people interested in depth psychology, embodiment, and expressive arts. This online community promotes deep conversations about home as a source of beauty, intimacy, mystery, and play, with talks by experts and a series of journal questions or conversation starters. Each talk is broken down into bite-sized segments so you can listen at your leisure.
Below, we feature a talk with the Jungian analyst James Hollis: “Nostalgia and Longing for Home.”
In the last few years, we’ve learned a lot more about the writer and psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé, friend of Nietzsche, lover of Rilke, colleague of Freud. There’s a new bio-pic that focuses on her independent spirit, and now the first English translation of her novel, Das Haus, by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger. A recent annotated edition, titled Anneliese’s House, will soon be released in paperback. In the meantime, the book is gaining the attention of literary critics, feminists, and followers of depth psychology.
For weeks, a bright-green advertisement for Meals on Wheels in The New Yorker delivered the bad news: Social Isolation is as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness. It is toxic, pernicious, erosive. Popular and academic publications are exploding with articles about the current epidemic. Experts all over the world are trying to figure out its root causes and possible antidotes. In The New York Times Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge note that “smartphone access and internet use increased in lock-step with teenage loneliness.”
For a time, home was a window on the world—an odd encampment where we zoomed through business, online schooling and relationships, while longing for the camaraderie of the crowd. What will the balance of home and outside activities look like in the months ahead?
Home structures the story of our lives. Mine began in Ireland, in a cloud of unknowing. I was told that I cried so much in the first few months of my life that I had to be operated on for a ruptured hernia. In my 4th year, I contracted tuberculosis, discovered accidentally while I was staying with relatives in England. Unable to walk I created an imaginary home, inhabited by imaginary parents, during the two years I was in hospital.
In the early years of the Iraq War, female veterans slowly trickled in. They, too, were thrust into the general patient pool. Sometimes we had fifty-seven male residents and three females on the same floor. Of course, the women complained that they were “hit on.” And they were scared—because their doors had no locks. The open-door policy had been in place for decades, to ensure staff access to all rooms in case of emergency.
As the nation absorbs gripping accounts from lawmakers who sheltered within the U.S. Capitol during the riot, and from the Capitol Police—a lingering trauma remains. If there is a redemptive dimension to this tragedy, it may be that it has brought home the city’s significance in our collective American story.