House As a Mirror of Self
Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
House as a Mirror of Self presents an unprecedented examination of our relationship to where we live, interwoven with compelling personal stories of the search for a place for the soul. Marcus takes us on a reverie of the special places of childhood--the forts we made and secret hiding places we had--to growing up and expressing ourselves in the homes of adulthood. She explores how the self-image is reflected in our homes/ power struggles in making a home together with a partner/ territory, control, and privacy at home/ self-image and location/ disruptions in the boding with home/ and beyond the "house as ego" to the call of the soul.
As our culture is swept up in home improvement to the extent of having an entire TV network devoted to it, this book is essential for understanding why the surroundings that we call home make us feel the way we do. With this information we can embark on home improvement that truly makes room for our soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marcus's eye-opening study of peoples' emotional ties to their houses, apartments, cottages, trailers and other dwellings offers useful, often startling perspectives on what makes a house a home. Maintaining, as did Carl Jung, that one's home is a symbolic mirror of one's inner self, of unconscious wishes and emotions, she interviewed approximately 60 people in their domestic settings, some over a 10-year period. Several respondents excessively bonded to a residence or its contents as a substitute for close relationships with people; at the opposite extreme were those who were unable to settle down in one place because having a permanent abode was fraught with unresolved emotional issues from childhood. Marcus, an architecture professor at UC-Berkeley, ably explores how personal crises, the need for privacy, couples' power struggles, divorce and career changes affect one's feelings about, and design of, one's living environment. Case studies, self-help exercises and informants' color drawings (not seen by PW) of their dwellings support her presentation. 40,000 first printing; $80,000 ad/promo; QPB selection; author tour.
