The house is a place of memory; our life is imprinted upon it, together with its joys, sorrows, contradictions and hopes. Here we raise our children, here our friends die, here love is born and illness is lived through. The place where we live has something to do with memory, feelings, concrete desires and relationships with one another. The primary meaning of the house is therefore a place of gathering and union. Freud wrote that the house is a substitute for the mother's womb, the first dwelling of the human person, for which, in all likelihood, man never stops yearning, because in it he felt safe and at ease.

Thus, in many languages, a distinction is made between the subjective "feeling at home" and the objective "residing in a house", and hence, within the same language, different words for a dwelling: "domus" and "aedes", "home" and "house", "Heim" and "Haus", and, in our own language too, "kuća" and "dom". Among the Romans, Domus denoted the social entity embodied by the "dominus", that is, "the master of the house", who was at the same time "pater familias". The Greek "oìkos" denotes not only the house, but also all the property belonging to a family and its management. The house is, as Mario Praz said, a "house of life" which, in its furnishings, architecture and layout, reflects taste, that is, the ineffable uniqueness of its owner.

"Today, in many places", writes Ernst Bloch, " it seems that the interior of houses stands ready for departure and parting. The disorder that reigns within them seems to express a wish to leave them as soon as possible. Bright, bare interiors like hospital rooms, exteriors like boxes set on conveyor belts, reminiscent of ships and partings, flat roofs like ships vanishing on the horizon".

The house should be a place where a person truly feels "at home", a place of expectation for the coming of a better world. "The true crisis of dwelling", writes Heidegger, "does not consist in a lack of places to live, but in the fact that people "must first of all learn to dwell, to live". Life is a care for something or someone. In the space that is cared for and that becomes a "home" we feel truly content, as though our desires were fulfilled, as though we were truly alive.

In the "Odyssey" Homer describes Odysseus's house, built around an olive tree, into whose living trunk Odysseus carved his immovable marriage bed. Starting precisely from the bedroom, which corresponds to the most intimate part of the house, there extends a section that runs through the interior and opens onto the atrium and the entrance courtyard. The courtyard is the place where the faithful dog Argos, in one of the most moving scenes of the poem, recognises his master, disguised as a beggar, returning home after twenty years' absence.

Our house, our home, can represent the expression through which we experience ourselves, including our own body and our relationships with other people. In dreams, a house may be new or old, rich or poor, elegant or dilapidated, warmly welcoming or coldly inhospitable, coloured or grey. We may dream of a house as ruined, abandoned, nearly collapsed, or else entirely demolished, flooded, burned, or destroyed by an earthquake. Each of these different images that appear in dreams may in fact bear witness to a fear of psychic and emotional breakdown, or to a period of emotional instability. Conversely, a house under construction may represent a desire for change, a reflection on new possibilities in one's relationships with others, just as the renovation of a dilapidated house is linked to aspects of repair. To dream that we are locked out of the house, or that we have lost our keys, may represent resistance to entering the anxious and complex reality of one's own inner world. The home of our childhood, its inner space and the happy memories of childhood, may be linked to the recognition of infantile parts of one's own self in intricate dreams in which the house is unfamiliar and mysterious.

The restrictions imposed on us by the pandemic, the ban on gatherings and the use of masks favoured an increase in the time we spend inside our homes, which are in fact often used as virtual offices because of remote working, sometimes changing, in a startling way, how living spaces are used. Distance learning for children who can attend school only partially requires a space protected from disturbance and interruption by other people. The same problem arises for so-called smart working, which involves using a space protected from acoustic and visual intrusions for much of the day, which in turn reduces or even prevents everyday family communication, which usually takes place without any particular order or plan, and is therefore often noisy and only apparently chaotic.

Places in the home that used to be dedicated to intimate communication and relationships (e.g. the bedroom), are now flooded with cold images from screens turning them into classrooms or virtual offices, in which there is no room for the immediacy of communication and the spontaneity of informal conversation. In addition, the transformation that in recent decades has affected the division of space within homes has favoured the spread of open spaces at the expense of so-called transitional spaces, which simultaneously connect and separate, as well as those spaces intended solely to protect intimacy. The open space (Open space), consisting of a single large room, has displaced the confined, bounded spaces such as the entrance hall, kitchen, dining room, living room, corridor or storeroom. Such a division, in the time of the pandemic, has caused even greater conflict within houses and flats.

In architectural terms, it is necessary to recognise the value and significance of the pause (the interval), the space that divides the outer part from the inner, that is, the great outer and public spaces intended for the masses, from the space of the family and the home. We need to revalue the in-between spaces where one can stop and be together, which give meaning to the outer and the inner, and thresholds as places conceived at once to separate and connect spaces for different functions. This is also necessary in relation to the very use of the house, which in our time has necessarily become multi-purpose.

The reduction, or even the absence, of places of transition and lingering, of in-between spaces that foster the protection of intimacy and the experience of various psychic states and functions, can lead to impersonal and unclear experiences of space, and can cause a kind of emotional and psychic confusion, communicative disorder, and tension in relationships.

Among the important architectural spaces of transition we must remember the entrance hall and the corridor within a home, which new ideas, new designs and new techniques do not take sufficiently into account, thereby relegating to the background the real life needs of those who live there.

The entrance hall allows a protected transition from the outer to the inner, from the open to the closed, from the public to the private and intimate. The purpose of the entrance hall is to represent a privileged place to pause and wait after entering, for welcome, for lingering and processing the unfamiliar, but also for extending the time for farewell before departure. The entrance hall is the space that divides the private (domestic) and the public through an acceptable and balanced combination of formal and informal, outer and intimate elements.

https://youtu.be/GWqboEbPMfI

The corridor is par excellence the place of the unclear, of a function that is not precisely defined. The French psychoanalyst J-B. Pontalis, drawing on the necessity and value of the transitional space that Winnicott proposed for the psycho-emotional development of the child, put forward a lovely image of the home. It is no bad thing that, between the parents' room and the children's room, there should be precisely a corridor. Everyone knows that children love to play in corridors, precisely because these are places that are free enough, in which different identities can cross, confront one another, and merge. The corridor in the film "La famiglia" by Ettore Scola is constituted as the privileged place for the staging and safekeeping of family memories and history across a succession of generations. In earlier times we could often see photographs of our grandfathers, grandmothers and parents at the entrances or in the corridors of houses. This is perhaps the place where the old and the new can meet - the past, present and future of a family. Anyone who enters can immediately understand that the family has its own past and tradition, its own present and the new circumstances in which it lives, but also its own future, relying on one another.

Architecture can be understood as a continuous elaboration of the areas that separate and connect the inner, private world with the outer social sphere, and that organise the entrances and exits from one space to another. It would be useful to design homes that become places enabling encounter and authentic family communication.

A "good enough" environment, as Winnicott would say, should include spaces that are participatory but not intrusive, that protect intimacy but are not exclusive, that are discreet and, in an adaptable/appropriate way, able to guarantee the need for isolation when this is felt to be necessary and needed, while at the same time preserving the possibility of communication with others. A meeting of architects and psychoanalysts/psychologists could aim at reflecting on spaces within homes that reunite, or at least allow contact between, body and psyche, the individual and the collective, the inner and the outer, the present and the past, avoiding crude and unhelpful divisions.

The world of architecture, generally defined as the conscious reflection on the building of the human environment, and the world of psychology, generally defined as the study of the psychological and emotional in human life, can be interwoven, so that through architecture the environment in which we live represents and reflects our deep unconscious needs. Renzo Piano stated that listening is the first step in creating architecture, in the sense of grasping the sense of community/togetherness that must be allowed to come alive within us. Therefore the one true occupational illness of psychotherapists is deafness, understood as the inability to listen, which holds true for most other professions too, including those who shape the environment in which we live.