CONFIGURATION

The process of creating a home starts with a ceiling, expands to form walls, and concludes with a floor that anchors us in place. It is an endeavor to seek shelter from an unpredictable world, constructing havens using materials such as concrete, wood, or stone. Our vision is of a nurturing home that fulfills our desires for safety, serenity, and comfort. However, inadvertently, its walls can become barriers, isolating us from the outside world and deepening our sense of separation. When safety is achieved it soon turns into comfort, and comfort, in turn, thickens the walls into barriers that deepen the fears of a world that now seems even more intimidating.

“Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations.”

Anne Balif

Painting workshop for Ukrainian children in Brandenburg, Germany, May 2022

“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure.”

Carl Jung

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