The Ground Is Slipping from My Feet: Links between Mourning and Home

Abstract

Based on psychoanalytic reflections about the manifestations of mourning, this article aims to outline possible ways to think about the relationship that bereaved subjects maintain with the previously shared home. In what ways does the home cross the subject in mourning in face of the absence of the lost object of love? Aiming to engage in this issue, we seek to think about mourning through a theoretical investigation, based on Freud, Lacan and Allouch in their resonances with the poetics of space and landscape of Bachelard and Collot, respectively. We observed that home is not restricted to the materiality of the house, being a symbolic-imaginary construction built together by its residents. The loss of one of the links in this creation demands sacrifice and reconstruction, so the home will need to be rebuilt by the bereaved from another symbolic place, and sometimes also from another literal place.