The First House: On the Womb, the Mother, and the Search for Home
By Suzanne Katanic
Estimated read time: 5–6 minutes
In psychoanalysis, the idea of home is rarely just about a physical structure. Home is the first psychic container: a womb, a mother, an atmosphere. Before we have language, before we can even breathe on our own, we are housed within someone else. We float in the amniotic fluid of our mother’s body, sustained by her breath, her rhythms, her emotions. She is our first house.
Whatever she feels, we feel. Whatever she ingests, whether nutritionally, emotionally, or relationally, filters into us. There is no boundary. In this earliest state, we are not separate; we are one. The developmental goal of life is to differentiate, but there remains a primal longing to return to that original oneness.
This longing becomes the psychic blueprint of what we call “home.”
But what happens when the mother, this first home, is unsafe? When her body is not a sanctuary but a source of emotional poison or psychic chaos? In clinical terms, we speak of the “bad mother” (Winnicott) or the “Dark Mother” (Fromm, Jung) as archetypes that represent the maternal figure who cannot hold, attune to, or safely mirror the child.
Fairy tales often symbolize this rupture. Take Snow White, for example. Her biological mother dies, and she is left with a stepmother who embodies the Dark Mother. Beautiful yet envious and cruel, this maternal figure poisons the child. The apple is both an act of violence and a metaphor for the way toxic maternal hatred can infiltrate the psyche, attacking the parts of the self that are most pure and alive.
Snow White must flee. She leaves her original home and escapes into the wilderness, which symbolizes the exile from the maternal environment. Even in exile, the longing remains: to find a new home, to feel whole, to be held safely again.
In therapy, this myth repeats itself in many forms. Clients often carry internalized versions of the Dark Mother. She can appear as a corporate mentor who devours their sense of worth, a female landlord who projects her own unresolved dragons onto others, or a visionary woman so consumed by ambition that she tramples those around her without noticing. These figures are not only external; they are psychic echoes.
Often, what people seek is not just safety but reconnection with a part of themselves that was stifled, dimmed, or nearly extinguished in that original environment.
This is the symbolic return to the castle, rebuilt this time by the self who has faced the dragons, named them, and survived. It is the return stage of the hero’s journey. This return is not to the literal place of trauma but to a new inner home built from stronger boundaries, conscious awareness, and self-compassion.
And what about the mother who devours instead of nourishes? She is insatiable. She consumes everything: her daughter’s vitality, her partner’s attention, even the emotional air in the room. Yet she remains empty. These mothers can feel like psychic black holes, endlessly taking in but giving nothing back.
In therapeutic language, this creates relational trauma. It is a pattern of giving without receiving, of being seen as an extension rather than an individual. Daughters of such mothers often carry immense guilt for wanting to separate, for needing space to breathe. But this separation is not betrayal. It is survival.
The journey continues: to find new mothers, new homes, even if they are symbolic. To rediscover a sense of safety in the world. To make peace with apartness, even while feeling the ache for connection.
Ultimately, the work is not about ending the longing for home but about recognizing which houses are haunted, which mothers wound us, and which inner sanctuaries we now have the power to build for ourselves.