Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Salman Akhtar ,  M. Nasir Ilahi ,  Rajiv Gulati
Publisher:   Karnac Books
Imprint:   Phoenix Publishing House
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.10cm , Length: 22.90cm
ISBN:  

9781800134201

ISBN 10:   1800134207
Pages:   208
Publication Date:   19 February 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments About the editors and contributors Introduction Introductory overview 1. The nature and functions of a home Nidhi Tewari Real and imaginary homes across the human life span 2. The biography of a home Nidhi Tewari 3. The search for a sense of home Sarita Singh and Rajiv Gulati 4. Homesickness, nostalgia, and the development of a stable internalized home Aisha Abbasi 5. Home, bitter home Gurmeet S. Kanwal 6. Orphanages and foster homes Milan Patel 7. Monasteries Salman Akhtar 8. Retirement homes, nursing homes, and hospices Murad Khan 9. Dwellings and absences thereof, within and without M. Nasir Ilahi Concluding commentary 10. Finally, a turn to poets Salman Akhtar References Index

Reviews

‘This wide-ranging and profound book on homes and other human dwellings is well worth a read and a re-read. It is comprehensive in what it covers: childhood homes, marital homes, nostalgia for lost homes, orphanages, retirement homes, monasteries, and much more. Along with such breadth, the book delves deeply, through historical reportage and psychoanalytic deconstruction, into the external realities it considers and the internal state of affairs they embody and represent.’ -- Joseph Fernando, MD Training and Supervising Analyst, Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, author of 'A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Trauma' ‘From the womb to the cemetery, this timely book explores the multiple facets of home. The three-year-old girl plays house, acting out all the characters in her family. The oedipal child makes forts out of pillows and blankets. The latency child decorates the room with multiple collections, dreams of growing up, and the adolescent isolates herself in her room where fantasies of leaving and building one's own home seem both exciting and terrifying. This book contains all this and much more. It is extremely important at a time when so many in our country might lose their homes!’ -- Ann Smolen, PhD Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, author of 'Six Children: The Spectrum of Child Psychopathology and Its Treatment' ‘Attics and Basements explores the multi-layered meanings of the notion of “home,” from our bodily beginnings in the womb and infancy to the challenges of old age and death, from the development of a sense of internal stability to existential threats. The book explores actual physical locations, the challenges of homelessness, and the notion of a secure base. In addition, the volume is infused with poetry, both in the use of language in the chapters themselves, and in the multiple references to poets and their creations – Rumi, Bachelard, T. S. Eliot, and Akhtar himself. This is a gem of a book, a pleasure both to read and digest.’ -- Dr. Julian Stern, Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, London, UK, Former Director, Adult and Forensic Services, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust

Author Information

Salman Akhtar, MD, is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. A prolific contributor to psychoanalytic literature, Dr. Akhtar has 118 authored or edited books to his credit, including Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (2009), Psychoanalytic Listening (2013), and, most recently, Damaged and Damaging (2026). He has delivered plenary addresses at both the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) and International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Congresses and has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He has received numerous awards including the highly prestigious Sigourney Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalysis (2012) and quite recently The Fred Pine Award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (2024). Dr. Akhtar has published eighteen volumes of poetry in three different languages and serves as a scholar-in-residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia.   Rajiv Gulati, MD, is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) and maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in Brooklyn. Born in New Delhi, Dr. Gulati has a strong interest in the ways in which culture inflects the experience of selfhood and crops up in the normative discourses that police gender and sexuality. He coedited the book, Eroticism (2021), with Dr. Salman Akhtar. He was the recipient, with coauthor David Pauley, of the APsA Committee on Gender and Sexuality’s 2020 Ralph Roughton Paper Award for “Reconsidering Leonardo Da Vinci and a memory of his childhood,” published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.   M. Nasir Ilahi is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY), affiliated with NYU Medical School. He is a fellow and graduate of the British Psychoanalytical Society and an honorary member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and chair of the board of directors of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP). He has authored, and lectured internationally, in areas dealing with primitive mental states/non-neurotic aspects of disturbance, and the role of internalized culture in theory and practice.

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