By Suzanne Katanic
Estimated Read Time: 5-6 minutes
In dreamwork, the house often appears not just as a building, but as a living, breathing metaphor, one deeply entwined with our developmental history. Carl Jung suggested that the house symbolizes the psyche: its rooms, its foundations, its forgotten attics and hidden basements reflecting the different layers of consciousness and memory. But the question remains: is this merely a tidy metaphor, or something far more consuming?
Can the house swallow us whole?
Many of us dream of homes that are expansive, crumbling, locked, flooded, or haunted. These houses aren't just backdrops; they’re psychic processes. They mirror the internal structures built in childhood: doors we were allowed to open, rooms we were told not to enter, walls we built ourselves. The psychological house becomes an active participant in our inner narrative. What does it mean when a sibling bars you from entering the dream house? When a parent lurks at the threshold, denying entry? Is the house rejecting you, or simply revealing the rejection you've already internalized?
Popular culture echoes these psychic dynamics, particularly in horror. Take Poltergeist: the quintessential suburban home built atop an unacknowledged Indigenous burial ground. Here, the pursuit of safety and domestic idealism rests on repressed violence, displaced history, and unhealed wounds. What we bury, historically, culturally, or personally, returns. And it usually returns through the basement.
In The Haunting of Hill House, the house offers itself as a place of safety, of retreat from the world’s chaos, but ultimately becomes a tomb for generational trauma. Safety, when overdetermined, can become a fortress that seals in shadow material: unspoken griefs, addictions, secrets. The house doesn't just trap us; it mirrors the ways we’ve already trapped ourselves.
And in Jordan Peele’s Us, the family returns to their beach house only to be met with their own literal shadows. The horror emerges not from the outside world breaking in but from what the house itself calls up and reflects back.
The home is often idealized as a sanctuary, but what if that sanctuary becomes the site of invasion? Or worse, colludes with the invader?
To ask psychoanalytically: where is the shadow stored in the home? In the crawlspace, the attic, the room you forgot existed? The home hides secrets, and not just familial ones, but the parts of ourselves we have exiled. What happens when the home, or the absence of one, becomes the container for disavowed pain?
Some of us never had a stable home. Some had one that was physically present but emotionally absent. The lack of a coherent psychological “house” shapes our sense of self as fragmented, unwelcome, and perpetually seeking safety in unsafe places. In response, we might cling tightly to constructed forms of safety such as over-control, perfectionism, or pristine domesticity. Or we may reject the very idea of home altogether, fearing it will betray us in the end.
In dreamwork and therapy, the house continues to unfold: its furniture rearranged, new wings discovered, ghosts stirred from the walls. As we explore it, room by psychic room, we must ask not just what the house is hiding, but what we are hiding from within it.
Is the house a refuge? A trap? A haunted mirror? Or is it simply us, waiting to be inhabited more fully?