Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Home’ emerges not as a geographical coordinate but as a psychic state—an interior condition of wholeness, fitting, and self-possession. Clarissa Pinkola Estés offers the most sustained phenomenology: home is ‘an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than space, where a woman feels of one piece,’ and it is holographic, capable of being carried in a single tree or drop of water. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham locate home within a spirituality of imperfection, defining it as the place ‘where one’s very hide fits’—a site of vulnerability, healing, and narrative belonging. The Homeric corpus provides the mythic substrate: the Odyssey constructs home as the supreme telos of human striving, the longed-for Ithaca toward which every wandering tends, and M. H. Abrams traces this Odyssean nostos into Romantic literature as the circuitous quest of consciousness returning to itself. Taoist psychology, through Liu I-ming, inverts the figure: the human body is itself ‘like a home,’ the psychic faculties its inhabitants, properly ordered when the mind of Tao governs. Giegerich invokes home ironically, warning against psychology’s tendency to remain a ‘stay-at-home,’ comfortable and unchallenged. Together these voices establish home as one of depth psychology’s most charged topoi: the place of origin, the goal of individuation, and the measure of psychic integration.
in some way it is an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than space, where a woman feels of one piece. Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us
Estés defines home as a psychic interior state of wholeness and sustained attention, not a physical location, recoverable by women even within lives of relentless external demand.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Home is the place where one’s very ‘hide’—limited and bounded almost by definition—fits. It is the place where I can be naked, which is to say vulnerable—undefended against being wounded because of confidence that there I will not be wounded.
Kurtz and Ketcham define home as the condition of radical vulnerability and belonging within limits, discoverable through the practice of storytelling.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994thesis
home is holographic. It is carried at full power in even a single tree, a solitary cactus in a plant shop window, a pool of still water… When you focus with soul-eyes, you will see home in many, many places.
Estés extends her phenomenology by asserting the holographic nature of home—its full potency present in any fragment of the natural world apprehended through soulful attention.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
going home does not necessarily cost money. It costs time. It costs a strong act of will to say ‘I am going’ and mean it.
Estés catalogs the mundane and diverse practices by which women return to the interior home-state, emphasizing will and intentionality over material resource.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The human body is like a home; the human vitality, spirit, soul, psyche, and intent are like the people in a home. When you refine the human mind and produce the mind of Tao, the vitality, spirit, soul, psyche, and intent each rests in its own position
Liu I-ming employs home as an analogy for the well-ordered body-psyche: when the mind of Tao governs, all inner faculties occupy their proper place, constituting a harmonious household.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
the poet repeatedly figures his own imaginative enterprise, the act of composing The Prelude itself, as a perilous quest through the uncharted regions of his own mind… connoting the wanderings of Odysseus in his search for home
Abrams identifies the Romantic poetic enterprise as a Odyssean nostos—an inward quest whose telos is the recovery of home as imaginative wholeness and mature consciousness.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
they tell of a journey as a home coming… Homeward now shall I journey, Homeward upon the rainbow… Now arrived home behold me, Lo, here, the Holy Place!
Campbell presents Navajo healing song as the archetype of a spiritual journey whose meaning is constituted entirely by homecoming—the sacred place reached is home itself.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting
To help Odysseus’ journey home, she stood beside each man in turn and said, ‘My lord, come to the meeting place, to learn about the visitor to our king’s home.’
The Odyssey establishes the homeward journey as the divine axis of its narrative, with Athena actively marshaling human community in service of Odysseus’s return.
, The Odyssey, 2017supporting
To pull the stay-at-home, psychology, away from the home in which it seems to have taken roots, it has to be relentlessly confronted with its faults.
Giegerich deploys ‘home’ ironically as a figure for psychology’s intellectual complacency—its resistance to rigorous self-confrontation—demanding that the discipline be uprooted from comfortable assumptions.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
let me have the fire in my palace… Odysseus cleaned his palace, house and courtyard alike, with sulphur… all the serving women clung to Odysseus, and greeted him, and made much of him
The ritual purification of the palace and the recognition by the household’s women enact the final restoration of Odysseus to home as both physical space and relational community.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting
They created a thriving small farm in the countryside… the house that they built was graceful to look at from the outside, and inside it was filled with old paintings and photographs.
Moore invokes the ancestral homestead as an emblem of soul-making through place, illustrating how neglect of the physical home registers as a loss of psychic rootedness across generations.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside
the light has gone into the darkness, nor is it becoming to sit about at the feast of the gods; but better to go home… No, no, in my house the dear son of Odysseus shall not have to go to sleep on the deck of a ship
Nestor’s insistence on housing Telemachus presents home in the Odyssey as the primary expression of xenia and moral order, contrasted with the exposure of the ship’s deck.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009aside