ABSTRACT

I have suggested that the notion of a psychic home is integral to understanding personal identity. Identity is a term that is of great relevance to issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexuality, and hence basic to understanding the tolerance/intolerance dynamic.

I argue that one of the constant elements is that of the psychic home and that this provides a basis for a sense of identity, for crucial questions such as ‘Who am I? Who do I look and act like? Which religion and nationality am I?’ They indicate a search for a place in life, an identity which provides a relatively stable sense of home, and that provides the core of the elusive and precarious notion of identity, whatever its complex vicissitudes, however much the human subject is distributed between other subjects. Such considerations provide a background for making sense of intolerant attitudes.