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Homecoming
(2013)
Philosophical and literary perspectives are combined with psychoanalytic ones in an attempt to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the theme of homecoming. The concepts of home and homecoming are presented as symbolic representations of fundamental psychical functions, and their vicissitudes as subjective manifestations of basic psychic organizations. The hypothesis is put forward that the ability, or lack thereof, to work through the process of mourning of a lost object colors the evolution and outcome of any reckoning with such a notion and what it stands for. Literary sources are used to supplement and explicate psychoanalytic understandings regarding how the concept of homecoming is being made use of, within unconscious dynamics observed in a number of analytic cases.
This paper addresses the notion of irrationality and madness, as they are understood within the psychoanalytic framework. By highlighting their similarities and differences, as well as by emphasizing the crucial defensive position that manifest psychosis holds in the midst of all this, an attempt is being made to delineate the links between the conjectured earliest interaction that the infant has with its environment and the burgeoning conscious rational mind. Winnicott's conceptualizations around fear of breakdown, disintegration, the environment-mother, and therapeutic regression are utilized to form a bridge between the theoretical understanding of madness and the clinical applications of this understanding, as illustrated by a clinical vignette.