In: Marchand, D., Weiss, K., Pol, E. (Dir.). 100 Key Concepts in Environmental Psychology. Routledge, 2023, p. 69-71.
Home refers to the universe – physical or intangible – strongly invested by a subject, whether the latter is an individual or a group. Endowed with its own social characteristics and atmosphere, this universe is inhabited by this subject in adequacy with him/itself, in a durable or temporary way.
An intangible home – such as a language or a collective history – is intimately associated by the subject with the mastery of the field of meanings and with the cultural, social, and ethical issues of this home, as well as with the identifications and attachments that the latter elicits in him. A subject’s ability to recognize himself in an intangible home is thus an event of his personal consciousness of inhabiting in his own way a shared heritage, affectively or by thought, in a way “from the inside”.
Home as a physical expanse covers a wide range of places whose meanings and scale can vary greatly, ranging from a house, a neighborhood, a city, a region, a country, or the Earth. It is, however, to the concrete house, situated in the world, that the notion of home is most commonly and closely associated, and often understood as a synonym.
The house introduces differentiation within space – spatium – by conferring on certain acts, such as the establishment of limits and of an interior, a founding significance of place which elicits an imaginary of huddling, of withdrawal into oneself and into the family, of peace and freedom. However, doors and windows, as well as the variations in approach routes to the house – side and front alley, threshold, etc. – and its near-home environment – garden, yard, private park, etc. – of the house reflect the diverse expressions of the relations between the outside world and the sphere of the intimate. Such expressions take the form of separations, connections, keeping the outside world at a distance or closer to home, and all are at stake in the act and experience of hospitality.
The interior, for its part, does not coincide with a single psychological universe. Deriving from the Latin adverb intus which means “inside» and sharing a common etymology with the term “intestines”, its polysemy refers to the homology between the inhabited interior and the interior of the person. The former offers a landscape with multiple tones, going from the intimus, i.e., “what is most interior”, the intimate of certain rooms, to the more “public” character of others, i.e., the most open to the stranger to the home.
As an example, the living room, despite its recent evolutions, remains the place where the inhabitant allows himself the most to be seen and where he plays with refinement the game of appearances and revelation to the strangers to the home. In the mode of variations on intimacy, the bathroom for its part balances between hygienism and sensuality, bringing to the surface the contradictions of modesty and narcissism. The house thus implies the existence of a given project to inhabit which, moreover, engages space – spatium -, through its appropriation, in the construction of the dweller’s self.
The examination of two of the Latin words that convey today the meaning and sense of home allows a deeper understanding of the latter. The abstract noun mansio, or “dwelling”, deriving from the verb manere, “to dwell”, to stop, to stay in a place, gave the French “maison” or house, as well as the English “mansion” and “manor”. The French preposition “chez“, deriving from the Latin casa, means “at the house of”, “in”, or “among”. “Chez” forms with the French personal pronoun “soi”, or “self”, the expression “chez soi”, usually translated in English as “at home”. The concept of “chez soi” conveys at once the sense of being at home in one’s place as well as the inhabitant’s awareness of his presence to himself, i.e., of his interiority.
Home and Chez soi both designate the stay, the habitation or dwelling in a place, of leaving and coming back to it, that is, the experience of duration and its fragmentations, as well as the weaving and potential tearing of emotional ties with this place. The two terms also refer to the family group, all domestic affairs, lineage, or dynasty. As such, both represent relationships between people, between them and the spaces of the shared territory, as well as between them and domestic objects.
The moral ties, of belonging, solidarity and affiliation among the inhabitants ensure the overall security and stability of the home and the chez-soi. But they also reveal the power relations, hierarchies and implicit or manifest inequalities of these places. The latter both constitute spaces of potential violence, conflicts of place and visibility. They bear witness to the alteration, over the stages of each person’s life, of the dynamics of solitude and community life, its adjustments, and arrangements, as well as the confrontations between the dwellers’ domestic objects. These spatio-temporal dynamics reveal a mode of a subject’s inscription in space, a habitual way of inhabiting and of being together, as underlined by the etymological origin of the term “to inhabit”, the Latin habere – to have, to hold – which expresses the continuity of a way of being in a place.
Beyond its synonymy with the house, the understanding of the concept of chez-soi takes us farther than the concept of home, as it opens, with the personal pronoun “soi”, or “self”, the fundamental perspective of the subject’s consciousness of being instituted in his interiority.
Interiority is presence to oneself, separateness, and the subject’s intimate, inner “at home” place. To assume himself as such, the subject must be separated from the other and receives his existence from this separation. Protected in the secrecy of his inner dwelling, the subject thus necessarily transcends himself to welcome the other. It is from inhabiting his own inner sphere that the subject can remain in the world, experience his spatial anchoring, establish places, build a house to access the experience of being at home in the world, as well as the experience of hospitality. Inhabiting physical space is grounded in the interior abode.
This inner dwelling is a place where movements for the establishment and renewal of its borders, the protection of its sovereignty and its autonomy are constant. It is permanently active to avoid the pitfall of withdrawing into itself, self-confinement and drifting towards self-alienation. Withdrawing into oneself alienate one’s capacity to welcome the other.
In its effort to transcend itself and open itself to the other, however, the inner dwelling must escape the risks of being overwhelmed by the assignments imposed by the other, of being expelled from itself and handed over to the other without recourse. These vacillations, recaptures, and restorations of the subject’s sovereignty in the secrecy of his interiority and the intimate temporality that unfolds there throughout the subject’s life, underline the openness and nomadism simultaneously inscribed in each one’s original chez soi and its dual dynamics. On one hand, the chez-soi hopes to be anchored both in the interior home and in the physical house, located “in the world”. On the other hand, it aspires to open to the other and experience shared journeys, hospitality, and encounter.
The ontological scope of the continuum between the interior dwelling and dwelling in the world opens the perspective of a subject who, to inhabit, must establish his concrete home-chez soi in the hope of making it, through active appropriation, constitutive of himself. The resonance of the appropriation gestures on the inhabitant himself results in a heightened dwelling awareness which, when the test of reality imposes it, will support his capacity to dwell elsewhere and to renew the actions and gestures which make and remake, through time, his dwelling.
Founded on the continuity between one’s interior abode and the home in the world, the sense of home-chez soi is thus the awareness of the constant effort to protect one’s interiority and one’s secret, as much as that of transcending their vacillations in order to open to the other.
