Tales from the therapist's couch

A young man comes to see me because he is bothered by an obsessive need to keep his house spotless. As he talks about his work, family and relationships, I am struck by how often he refers to his childhood home with longing and nostalgia. Also striking is how often he aligns himself with his parents' opinions, setting himself against his siblings whom he describes as self-centred and rebellious. He puzzles over the fact that although he longs to be at home with his parents, he usually feels restless and irritable when actually back with them for any length of time. Once home, he wants to get away.

A young man comes to see me because he is bothered by an obsessive need to keep his house spotless. As he talks about his work, family and relationships, I am struck by how often he refers to his childhood home with longing and nostalgia. Also striking is how often he aligns himself with his parents' opinions, setting himself against his siblings whom he describes as self-centred and rebellious. He puzzles over the fact that although he longs to be at home with his parents, he usually feels restless and irritable when actually back with them for any length of time. Once home, he wants to get away.

Homesickness, or waves of longing for something felt to be lost, is a common enough experience at various stages in life. Patterned into myths as the paradise from which we inevitably fall, it can be understood psychologically as a longing for freedom from the inevitable conflict we experience as we struggle to become our separate selves.

Every child needs to eat from the tree of knowledge, and every child feels that it is complicated, prohibited. The forbidden apple is a symbol of choice and conflict, of desire for something that moves us away from the early comfort of maternal fusion. In becoming our own person, we need to leave our earliest source of love, and the path to separation is littered with painful gestures of compliance and defiance. Sometimes, for reasons both within and outside of parental control, this passage becomes fraught with difficulty.

The psychoanalyst D W Winnicott once wrote about a boy he worked with who was obsessed with string. He would tie objects together all the time, chairs to tables, tables to cushions, etc. His mother had been frequently hospitalised and Winnicott interpreted the string play as an expression of the boy's fear of separation. It wasn't safe to let go and venture forth alone.

Sometimes, unlike Winnicott's patient, it is a surfeit of parental presence rather than absence that prevents the cord being cut, the apple being eaten. The young man obsessed with cleanliness had witnessed much parental wrath when his siblings had munched the forbidden fruit. Terrified of a similar outburst, he chose to toe the parental line. But the cost was heavy. Love was conditional upon compliance and lack of separateness. His feverish need for order was his unconscious way of trying to ward off waves of anger and anxiety.

Unfortunately, finding our own feet is usually a slow and complicated process, unresolved by a single gesture of self-expression. I once worked with a woman who had a recent experience of agoraphobia. She was in love, soon to be married, and didn't understand why she had suddenly become utterly terrified of open spaces. When asked about her background, she described a close-knit religious community. She told me how her parents had always expected her to marry within this, and didn't hide their disappointment when they learnt she had chosen someone from a different background.

Unlike the young man, this woman had dared to follow and take pleasure in the promptings of her heart rather than obey the parental creed. It was the aftermath of her decision that she couldn't cope with. Engagement to someone "other" meant disengagement from all that was familiar. She began to paint an idealised picture of her childhood, one that she longed for and feared she had excluded herself from forever. (Her phobia started shortly after she told her parents of her engagement.)

For both of these people, nostalgia for a child-like state was a response to the pain and conflict of becoming separate. It's a mood with which most of us can identify. In the struggle between our desire for belonging and our need for individuality, we know the irritability that comes with too much compliance, and the fear that goes with the responsibility of making our own decisions.

Freud was clear on this issue. Conflict and separation are part of what it means to be human. Longing for paradise is avoidance of the responsibility of individual choice. Freud showed that learning how to tolerate separation means learning how to love, as love is about the coming together of individuals.

Home is where we start from, before our early paradise is lost. But, if all goes well, home is also where the heart is, where a different kind of paradise may be regained.

elizabeth.meakins@blueyonder.co.uk

Elizabeth Meakins is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. None of the clinical material above refers to individual cases