Product Description

House as a Mirror of Self presents an unprecedented examination of our relationship to where we live, interwoven with compelling personal stories of the search for a place for the soul. Marcus takes us on a reverie of the special places of childhood—the forts we made and secret hiding places we had—to growing up and expressing ourselves in the homes of adulthood.

She explores how the self-image is reflected in our homes; power struggles in making a home together with a partner; territory, control, and privacy at home; self-image and location; disruptions in the boding with home; and beyond the "house as ego" to the call of the soul.

As our culture is swept up in home improvement to the extent of having an entire TV network devoted to it, this book is essential for understanding why the surroundings that we call home make us feel the way we do. With this information we can embark on home improvement that truly makes room for our soul.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187839 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 298 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780892541249
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
This is a refreshing, unique, and fascinating look at how we feel about our homes, how we shape them to suit ourselves, why some homes make is feel safe and secure and at ease, and others make us paranoid and uncomfortable. This book, in my opinion, should be legally required reading for every architect, interior designer, and real estate agent. For the rest of us, it is a surprisingly interesting look at the meaning of home. Clare Cooper Marcus's extensive and detailed interviews with people living in all kinds of homes, from illegal shacks to mansions, provide eye-opening insights into what "home" is, and how to create the feeling of home for you. It's about time someone finally wrote this book!

From Publishers Weekly
Marcus's eye-opening study of peoples' emotional ties to their houses, apartments, cottages, trailers and other dwellings offers useful, often startling perspectives on what makes a house a home. Maintaining, as did Carl Jung, that one's home is a symbolic mirror of one's inner self, of unconscious wishes and emotions, she interviewed approximately 60 people in their domestic settings, some over a 10-year period. Several respondents excessively bonded to a residence or its contents as a substitute for close relationships with people; at the opposite extreme were those who were unable to settle down in one place because having a permanent abode was fraught with unresolved emotional issues from childhood. Marcus, an architecture professor at UC-Berkeley, ably explores how personal crises, the need for privacy, couples' power struggles, divorce and career changes affect one's feelings about, and design of, one's living environment. Case studies, self-help exercises and informants' color drawings (not seen by PW) of their dwellings support her presentation. 40,000 first printing; $80,000 ad/promo; QPB selection; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Retired U.C. Berkeley Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture Clare Cooper Marcus has written several other books on architecture and community, including Housing as If People Mattered and People Places. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Customer Reviews

Determine what you REALLY want and need from your home
I wish my husband and I had read this book before we began designing our new home instead of after the plans were done. I would have understood why the whole process was making me feel angry and negated, he would have understood why he was not more excited about the whole design process. We now understand why we haven't felt the nesting instinct in our present home and what unfufilled yearnings we brought to every place we have lived in alone and together. This book should be required reading for architects and interior designers and builders. It would change the questions they asked their clients and move all toward a more fulfilling experience. Instead of asking how many rooms do you need and how big should they be, a designer could help clients explore what they found nurturing in former homes and what emotional needs could be met in the design of their new spaces. Very Jungian, but easy to use with worksheets for exploring ideas on your own. The book brought tears to our eyes and answers to our unasked questions. I'm almost ready to dump the current plans and start all over again with new excitment and optomism.

Enlightening
I found this book when I was undergoing my own deep personal transformation ten years ago. It helped me understand my own relationship to the homes I had created for clients and my self. As an interior designer and a contractor it is important to understand the calling of the client's psyche and meet those needs. There is so much focus now on the spiritual aspects of one's home, and feng shui does offer up its own insights, but using this book as a primer for understanding what is calling to you will lead you to a different more integrated understanding. A carpenter builds a house, the family makes it a home. Clare gives the reader a path to understanding this complex yet simple process. The book is easy to read and offers many good exercises to dialog with the inner self. I highly recommend it to designers and psychologist alike.

House As a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home
Have you every just fallen in love with a house, knowing that you were meant to live there? Have you ever had an apartment that seemed to suck the energy right from your body after a long hard day at work? Are there certain places in your home that are "yours" or "your spouse's"?

Unconsciously we are all seeking to become our genuine selves. In this quest, we tend to surround ourselves with ideals, examples of what we feel matches our deepest parts of ourselves. These examples come primarily from past experience. For instance, we may have had a special place in a childhood home where we felt safe, loved, and free. Alternately, we may subconsciously associate a large dining room with sadness after the loss of a parent or unvoiced hostility in a dysfunctional family setting.

House As A Mirror of Self brought to light many of the things that I had forgotten in my childhood and many of the situations that I hadn't really thought about. It is truly interesting what you gravitate towards because of your previous experiences and how those decisions get combined and complicated with that of your spouse. I even figured out why I was feeling that there was something not quite right about my home office.