Attics And Basements: The Evocative, Expressive And Embracing Functions Of Homes And Other Human Dwellings

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.

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.