Attics and Basements

Salman Akhtar, MD, is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. A prolific contributor to psychoanalytic literature, Dr. Akhtar has 118 authored or edited books to his credit, including Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (2009), Psychoanalytic Listening (2013), and, most recently, Damaged and Damaging (2026). He has delivered plenary addresses at both the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) and International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Congresses and has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He has received numerous awards including the highly prestigious Sigourney Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalysis (2012) and quite recently The Fred Pine Award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (2024). Dr. Akhtar has published eighteen volumes of poetry in three different languages and serves as a scholar-in-residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia. Rajiv Gulati, MD, is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) and maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in Brooklyn. Born in New Delhi, Dr. Gulati has a strong interest in the ways in which culture inflects the experience of selfhood and crops up in the normative discourses that police gender and sexuality. He coedited the book, Eroticism (2021), with Dr. Salman Akhtar. He was the recipient, with coauthor David Pauley, of the APsA Committee on Gender and Sexuality’s 2020 Ralph Roughton Paper Award for “Reconsidering Leonardo Da Vinci and a memory of his childhood,” published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. M. Nasir Ilahi is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY), affiliated with NYU Medical School. He is a fellow and graduate of the British Psychoanalytical Society and an honorary member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and chair of the board of directors of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP). He has authored, and lectured internationally, in areas dealing with primitive mental states/non-neurotic aspects of disturbance, and the role of internalized culture in theory and practice.

‘This wide-ranging and profound book on homes and other human dwellings is well worth a read and a re-read. It is comprehensive in what it covers: childhood homes, marital homes, nostalgia for lost homes, orphanages, retirement homes, monasteries, and much more. Along with such breadth, the book delves deeply, through historical reportage and psychoanalytic deconstruction, into the external realities it considers and the internal state of affairs they embody and represent.’

• AcknowledgmentsAbout the editors and contributorsIntroductionIntroductory overview1. The nature and functions of a homeNidhi TewariReal and imaginary homes across the human life span2. The biography of a homeNidhi Tewari3. The search for a sense of homeSarita Singh and Rajiv Gulati 4. Homesickness, nostalgia, and the development of a stable internalized homeAisha Abbasi5. Home, bitter homeGurmeet S. Kanwal6. Orphanages and foster homesMilan Patel7. MonasteriesSalman Akhtar8. Retirement homes, nursing homes, and hospicesMurad Khan9. Dwellings and absences thereof, within and withoutM. Nasir IlahiConcluding commentary10. Finally, a turn to poetsSalman AkhtarReferencesIndex