Imaginary Homelife

The fire that provides comfort and warmth can also destroy: the homely becomes unhomely. This fire scars Maggie as "homely," as she bears the marks of the home and its destruction. Does this fire imply that feeling at home is delusional or impossible?
- S. Brook

My belief, based on Freudian theory, is that yes, feeling at home is a misconception. Freud employs the terminology "homely" and "unhomely" in his essay "The Uncanny," written in 1925. Respectively, these two terms (for Freud) are synonymous with the familiar and the uncanny. Freud relates that "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" (220). What is "old and long familiar" has a lot to do with the act of becoming a stranger to oneself. This othering of ourselves, Freud believes, goes hand in hand with the fear of death and "probably the 'immortal' soul was the first 'double' of the body." Freud goes on to explain that the 'double' emerges with our earliest ability to cultivate self-love, or "primary narcissism." We move beyond 'primary narcissism' when we age but instead of becoming a whole person, the original narcissism "can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego's developement" (235). In other words, the self-love becomes self-observation - the way I see myself. I am at once myself and something else...something I'm not entirely 'at home' with. I will never regain the completeness I had before I was aware of myself. In extending this idea, I view the home as a place to replicate those comforts we embraced as children. I argue that, once we establish a home base we recognize it not through learning aboout it from scratch - as a foreigner - but because we fashion it into something we already recognize. However close we come to duplicating the "old and long familiar" within our homespace we will always fail thus the impossibility of ever being truly at home.
On a personal note, after an unsettling childhood experience, I gained an imaginary friend. I feel this was my primitive attempt to create a more homely atmospere in a place that had become frightening and unfamiliar. Curiously, her name was Canna.


Freud, S. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete Pychological Works of Sigmund Freud, V. 17. UK: Hogarth Press, 1955. 219 - 256.