Is there a cure for homesickness?

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What happens when we lose touch with the people and places we love most? When we have no access to our cherished memories? 

During the big wave of immigration in the 19^th century, homesickness was pervasive. It was also soul-destroying.  In fact, it took such a toll on the newcomer's health it was regarded as a serious medical condition.  “Homesick” meant depressed, moody, melancholy. It was associated with lack of energy and engagement.  A general wasting of the body and the spirit.      

Relocating meant severing all ties with one family and homeland, and during this great era of resettlement, America was awash in homesickness.  One of the hardest things for immigrants was the loss of family talismans.  Certain possessions quietly affirm who we are and what we value. They reflect our culture, bolster our sense of identity, anchor us in time and place. Without them, we may grow disoriented and even lose our will to live.  As the psychologist William James once observed, “We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”    

     

     Consider Sigmund Freud’s sudden move to London from Vienna, just before the start of World War II.   When  Freud closed his practice in Austria, he arranged to transport his collection of some two thousand antiquities to his new house in Hampstead. Years later he told his biographer Ernest Jones that his beloved statuettes helped him to adjust to a foreign land. Freud’s collection served as a kind of security blanket, helping him to feel safe so he could find his way in a foreign culture.  In his consulting office,  lined with figurines of animals, ancient gods and goddesses, Freud helped patients wade through a labyrinth of threatening feelings and emotions. His life’s work was showing people who had gotten lost internally how to find their way back home.

Our possessions give us with a deep sense of continuity and connection. Perhaps that’s why we also refer to them as our belongings.  

     Often a single object allows us to reconstruct our feelings for a place.  As a child, the writer May Sarton heard stories about her family home in Belgium—a place with the magical name of “Wondelgem.” At the start of World War I, her parents fled the country and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Once peace was declared, they went back to see what remained of their estate.  “We were there at the gate,” Sarton writes, “At first, my (parents) must have felt their life together violated, trampled down.”  The building had been bombed, as was now nothing but a ruin.    Then her mother cried out, “Look, George!” lifting a single Venetian glass with a graceful stem from a pile of rubbish.  “How has this single object survived to give us courage?” 

If you had only minutes to pick out what you loved the most and stuff it in a travel bag, what items would you choose?  What piece of home would you carry with you as a talisman?  To give you hope and help you to begin your life anew?