The concept of «home» for a person has many meanings, merged together and emotionally colored.
This is shelter, shelter, protection from bad weather and the misfortunes of the outside world, here you can hide, hide, fence off: «My house is my fortress.»
This is also a place of residence, an official address where a person can be found, where one can write letters — a point in the space of the social world where he finds himself: “Let’s exchange addresses, tell me your coordinates!”
It is also a symbol of family life, a warm hearth — it’s sad when the house is empty, when no one is waiting for you; It’s hard to be a homeless orphan.
It also embodies the idea of an intimate, personal space, the abode of the human «I». To return home is to return to oneself: “I am at home. Come to me, let’s sit!»
The house as a symbol of the human personality is present both in the general cultural tradition and in the symbolism of the mental life of an individual. If someone dreams that he wanders through the strange rooms of a familiar-unfamiliar house, then when analyzing the dream, it often turns out that it was a journey through different inner spaces and nooks and crannies of his own «I».
A person’s body can also be considered the carnal home of his soul, and in everyday speech formulas the head is often represented as the home of his psyche: “This mind has a chamber, but that one probably doesn’t have all the houses, it seems that his roof has gone!”
The last refuge of the body — the coffin — is called «domovina» in the folk language, just like a lifeless dead body in folk poetics is compared with an empty house without an owner.
We can say that a house for a person is a collection of spaces of different sizes nested into each other — from the size of one’s own body to the limits of the homeland, the Earth and even the Cosmos: “Our home is Russia”, “The Earth is our common home”. It is no coincidence that in folk culture the structure of the house as a microcosm reproduces the structure of the universe.
It turns out that the psychological volume of the idea of a house in a person’s experiences has pulsating boundaries, sometimes expanding to the size of the universe, sometimes gradually narrowing to the limits of one’s own «I». But, in any case, the house always remains the place where a person is, the center of his spatial being.
Let us introduce here the concept of «place», which will be encountered more than once in the text of this book, since it has an important, content-rich meaning in the children’s subculture. The speech formula typical for children is characteristic: “Let’s go, I will show you one place!” A conversation about it can begin with the fact that the category of place is primary and most important in children’s knowledge of the objective world. At first, a place is a point, a site, a locus of space where something is located. For a child, “to be existing” means to occupy a certain place in this world. If something exists, then it necessarily has its place in space. Having a place is a necessary and sufficient sign of existence for children.
When a child is very small, he lives according to the principle “what has fallen is gone”, i.e. what has disappeared from his field of vision no longer exists.
For a younger preschooler, the place of a thing is its essential attribute. If there is a place (specially left, somehow marked), and the object is temporarily absent, it still exists. If this place is occupied by someone else, then this other person begins to exist instead of the absent one, replacing him and, thus, forcing him out of life, depriving him of the opportunity to be. Therefore, concern for one’s own place in the house, the anxiety and irritation that arise in a child when he sees that someone wants to take his place is an attempt to ensure his existence, to affirm the fact of his presence in the current life. Adults do not understand this children’s problem well: sometimes, when playing, they deliberately tease and frighten the child by sitting on his chair or lying in his bed. In such cases, children usually react very emotionally: they get scared, offended, angry. Adults are amused by the fact that a child does not understand the difference in size: how can a big person fit in a small crib? Indeed, an understanding of the proportionality of the sizes of objects will become available to the child when he grows up. But at the same time, the child clearly understands the main thing — that an adult claims his rightful place in the home world and tries to push the child out of nowhere, into oblivion.
The desire to designate, strengthen, stake out the fact of one’s own existence in this world is very clearly present in the child’s behavior. Quite early it becomes an important theme of a person’s personal efforts and does not leave him throughout his life. For a child, this problem is especially acute. Due to the fact that undeveloped self-awareness will not give him sufficient evidence that “I am” for a long time, the child constantly needs external confirmations of the fact of his existence. Therefore, children love to place signs of their presence in prominent places — for example, build a tower of blocks in the middle of the room for everyone on the road. Or they start a game, literally getting under the feet of adults. Parents are surprised: “Can’t you go to play somewhere else, because you’re in the way here ?!” They do not understand that the child just wants everyone to bump into him. Thus, he tries to attract the attention of adults, remind himself of himself and get from them a lively response to his presence that he needs so much.
This is also the reason why small children take a long time to learn how to play hide-and-seek. The bottom line is not that they do not understand the task facing them — to sit quietly and not look out, but that they cannot psychologically endure this situation. It seems to them that if they became invisible to others, then thus they ceased to exist for others. Then a doubt begins to creep into the soul: do I exist at all, which the children immediately resolve for themselves, leaning out of the shelter a few seconds later to show themselves to the world. Let them be scolded for this by older and more experienced participants in the game. All the same, this is a way to get the desired confirmation that everything is in order with them: “If they scold me, then I am.”
It happens that adults, affectionately addressing a small child, ask in a tone of joyful recognition: “Who is this sitting here? This is our Andryusha!”; “And who came? This is Tanya!
At first glance, such questions may seem strange: doesn’t grandmother see who is sitting here or who has come? These are her own grandchildren! Why ask such stupid questions? Meanwhile, the realization of their necessity speaks of the subtle pedagogical intuition of some adults.
These questions are asked for the sake of the child. For him, the response of adults to his presence or appearance is very important: “I am, I exist, they noticed and recognized me!”
The child’s living the problem of his place as a confirmation of the fact of being occurs not only in everyday life, but also in the process of his communication with the traditional texts of maternal folklore addressed to young children. In this sense, the tale of Masha and the three bears resonates deeply in the child’s soul, helping him to understand and feel this topic on someone else’s experience, to which you can repeatedly return, exhaust it, again and again listening to this tale. Let’s remind it to the adult reader.
Lost in the forest, Masha climbed into the hut of three bears. In the upper room, she sat in turn on the chairs of Mikhail Ivanovich, the bear-father and the bear Nastasya Petrovna, tasting the food from their cups. Then she climbed onto the chair of little Mishutka and ate everything from his cup, and broke the chair. She went into the bedroom, lay down on the beds of Mikhail Ivanovich and Nastasya Petrovna and crumpled them, and then lay down in little Mishutka’s bed and fell asleep there. When the bears returned home, they immediately saw signs of an invasion. The grown-ups roared and roared in anger as their seats—the chair, the cup, the bed—were defiled by the presence of the alien. And little Mishutka cried inconsolably, because Masha had deprived him of everything: she emptied his cup, broke his high chair, took over his bed, displacing Mishutka completely. Fortunately, the roar of the bears woke her up, and she jumped out the window and ran away to her home. So the situation, fortunately, resolved itself. Despite the unpleasant experiences, Mishutka still got off lightly — he did not have to fight with Masha for his place in his own home. But many children who have younger brothers or sisters face this problem. It gives rise in the child’s soul to acute feelings of jealousy, envy, resentment towards the mother, anger towards the baby, which partially displaces the elder from the heart of the mother, deprives him of his former attention and even takes away his usual place in the room, taking the small bed in which the eldest child grew up.
In independent creativity, for example, in the world that a child creates in a drawing, he tries not to allow such injustice. If you draw, then everyone should have their own place, no one will be blocked by anything, no one else will encroach on anyone’s space.
For example, art teachers like to set still lifes with complex relationships of objects: a gourd blocks a pumpkin, two apples lie in front of it against the background of a gourd. The preschooler in his drawing will try to arrange the «heroes» of the still life so that they feel good — not infringed, independent, — i.e. separately without interfering with each other. The child tries to ensure that the edges of each object are completely outlined, and their contours do not intersect. Where in the image of an adult artist the apples lie against the background of a jar, and the jar against the background of a pumpkin for a child, the apples in the drawing aggressively invaded the jar, grabbing the juice of its own space, they made it defective. Just as the jug drove into the pumpkin, and all that was left of the poor pumpkin was a stub sticking out from behind the jug. The child wants each object depicted by him to retain the constancy of its form and its integrity and, thus, its recognizability. That is why the child strives to draw their full portraits. The study and transmission of complex spatial relationships between objects is interesting for an adult artist. The child, on the other hand, is inclined to replace them with a simpler attitude of disposition in accordance with the principles of early childhood logic, which determines both concrete actions and the very worldview of the child. Therefore, in his drawing, the young artist will diligently list, placing next to each other, all the heroes of his still life: here is a jug, and this is a big pumpkin, and these are apples, they all live here safe and sound, no one interferes with each other, does not encroach on a strange place, and everyone is completely visible, everyone can be recognized.
The foregoing makes it possible to understand why the child reacts so painfully to certain situations. For example, he jealously guards his bed, even when they put a young guest in it only for one night, sending the little owner to another place, and he, alarmed, comes to check early in the morning whether the guest will inadvertently stay forever, and tries to quickly remove him. Here, it is important for parents to take into account the child’s psychology, to be very careful and diplomatically subtly organize the situation so that the child does not feel disadvantaged and ousted from his rightful place.
Children’s jealous attitude to the place can sometimes be observed in adults with unresolved personal problems.
Three guests come to a man of forty years old and sit in his office for a conversation: some are on a chair, some are on a sofa, and one guest accidentally sat in the owner’s chair. The owner sank down on the sofa, grew gloomy, sat for a while, becoming more and more annoyed internally, and then quite abruptly drove the guest out of his seat with the words: “Sit down from here, when I’m not sitting in this chair, I’m not myself, I can’t talk!”
An employee who has a free schedule and, in principle, does not particularly need a separate table in the common room, may complain that he does not have his own table and demand to set it up, primarily so that his presence as a significant person is this table symbolically fixed. The size of the table, its location in the space of the room, in the force field of human relationships can also express the social status and influence of the owner and will perform these functions even in his absence.
But even a fully mature person knows how important it is in a social situation to designate one’s place, to fix one’s participation, one’s presence, which others must reckon with.
It is all the more understandable why the child cares so much that his place at the table is exactly his device: a cup with gnomes, a plate with mushrooms, a spoon with a bear cub. These items are not just things that have consumer value, they are signs-substitutes for the child himself, they help the child to designate his place, to fix him in the minds of other people, to assert his self, to materialize his «I».
Let’s make here a small digression into the history of psychology. The famous American philosopher and psychologist W. James at the end of the XNUMXth century was the first to discover that in order to understand the personality, it is important to assess what exactly in this world a person considers “himself”. It turned out that it is often difficult to draw a line between what a person calls himself and what he means by the word mine. As James wrote, our good name, children, the creations of our hands can be as dear to us as our own body, and attacks on them are experienced as a direct attack on ourselves. To describe the structure of personality, James introduced the concepts of «material I», «social I» and «spiritual I».
Let us consider the first of these concepts, which is now important for our narrative. Within the limits of their own material-carnal «I», many adult people include not only their own body as the receptacle of the soul, but some objects (clothing, personal belongings, products of their creativity) even people with whom they internally identify. At the same time, the same object for different people can become both an integral part of the “I”, and an insignificant appendage or an object completely foreign to us. There are people who do not even consider their own body. And there are those for whom the circle of their material «I» includes both the house with all its contents and family members.
There are mothers who throughout their lives perceive their child as an inseparable part of themselves: “We have already gone to kindergarten”; «We study well»; «We’re finishing school soon.» It can be difficult for them to admit that an adult son or daughter is a separate person and has the right to an independent existence. And there are parents who are struck by a mysterious manic self that is present even in a newborn baby: “This is a child, we gave birth to him, and at the same time such a mysterious incomprehensible property, a completely special world.”
Another major psychologist of the mid-XNUMXth century, G. Allport, highlighting the acts of development of the “selfhood” of a person, also drew attention to the fact that identification with one’s own name, clothes, and favorite things strengthens the child’s sense of identity — a sense of continuity and constant existence of oneself.
However, in general, the problem of how a person cognizes himself and asserts his existence, leaving his mark in this world, “objectifying” himself in various types of symbolic activity, is very multifaceted and is still waiting for its researchers. In the context of this book. It is important for us to understand how children of different ages try to do it alone and in a company. As we will see later, children invent many ways to «materialize» themselves in the spatial field they are learning. Outside the house, these are drawings on asphalt, and inscriptions on the walls, and a children’s tradition of making “secrets” and “hiding places”. But still, the first external space that becomes «one’s own» is the house in which the child lives. Therefore, it is especially important for him to gain a foothold and establish himself at home, to place numerous signs of his presence here.
Children often use their drawings and crafts as substitutes for themselves, since the author’s presence in them is much more noticeable than in the purchased item. In general, the child is usually very diverse in the ways in which he asserts himself in the space of the house, “inhabits” the home world. he lives the space, filling it with invisible, but preserved in the memory of the child, the trajectories of his movements. Where necessary, he will leave his plenipotentiaries.
The little one will make karyaki-maryaki on the wall or on the door, a larger one will hang his drawings over his mother’s bed in order to be closer to her, shove his doll under her pillow at night, put a plasticine figurine on the bedside table.
Older children sometimes trace a drawing on the wallpaper near their bed with a pencil, paint on the contours of a stain on the wall to make an amusing image, make small hiding places in their own apartment “for interest”, i.e. they put their hand to ensuring that the material imprint of their hidden creative activity remains in the house. Such behavior may be strange to an adult in form, but in fact close to him in essence.
A young wife, having settled in her husband’s house, feels that she will become a real mistress there only when she sorts everything out, cleans up, shifts, at least a little — but in her own way. That is, she will master the space of a new home, turning it into a field of her active actions, coming into contact with every object on which the trace of her hands remains. She will definitely introduce her own things there, which will become signs of her master’s presence.
A man does the same. The sooner he will get used to the new home, the sooner he will find everything there that can be corrected, repaired, adjusted. He will pay special attention to those material components on which the life of the house depends (switches, faucets, handles, etc.), and thus will keep abreast of domestic events.
It can be said that in the space of the house the degree of «objectification» usually expresses the «measure of presence» of each of the family members. It’s bad when one fills everything around, crowding others. It is bad when there is an unfortunate outcast in the house who does not have his own living space and even his own place — a bed, a desk, a wardrobe or a shelf.
And vice versa, in friendly, well-organized families, where each family member is respected and unique, and relationships are built, usually everyone remembers where someone’s place is, where everyone likes to sit, and accordingly cups are placed: for dad — with a ship, for mom — with rose, grandmother’s favorite — with blue leaves, granddaughter — with a cockerel, etc.
Sometimes it is important to emphasize the importance of a family member, to express respect for him through his things-symbols. This is your place — no one can take it but you; this is your cup — it will not be delivered to a random guest; this is your table — you are its owner, no one will put things in order here without asking you.
Things-symbols help to structure the space of the house as a field in which family members live and interact. Through such things, you can consolidate the position and enhance the effect of a person’s presence, improve his relationship with others.
So, the house becomes the first social space for the child, where the relations of family members with each other are symbolically fixed in the objective environment. It is in his daily home experience that a small child first learns the meaning of possessive speech forms — yours, mine, father’s, mother’s — through the awareness of belonging to personal things that simultaneously personify each of the family members. It is known that younger children think in complex concepts. They are a set of elements associated with each other.
So, “Papa” is a big bearded man who is so nice to sit on his knees, and his leather chair, and his desk littered with books, and his cup with a blue ship, and the sound of his voice, and many other things and events related to it.
Each family member usually has his own “zones of influence” at home, tends to occupy certain places, and is represented by his own symbolic things.
For a child to understand the social space of the family, joint meals are a very important event. Family breakfasts, lunches and dinners begin with a table setting. In this action, the child often takes part to the best of his ability: he counts all the members of the family, lays out spoons, forks, etc. (At the same time, he may miss himself, because he is not visible to himself.) family members. Placed plates and cutlery indicate the place and personal space allocated for each participant in the meal.
The plate is the area of personal responsibility of its owner. It is filled with food, which is said to be «mine». Here, for many children, for the first time, the theme of a fair division appears — in this case, the division of the total amount of food between eaters, the division of space at the table, etc. — and the idea of each individual share. At the same time, an individual is a participant (i.e., part) of the company that has gathered at the table and is something whole that affects everyone. The material embodiment of this community will be a single space of the table, around which everyone is sitting, and common items — a salad bowl, a bread box, a salt shaker, a sugar bowl, where everything is required by everyone.
The need to use common objects at the table immediately confronts the child with the problem of cooperation in the general object-social space of the feast: either reach out to the necessary objects himself, or resort to the help of another person. But how? Here it is important that parents are aware of the pedagogical meaning of this situation.
There are parents who are simply materialistic. They understand food as a physiological process of satiety and pay little attention to relationships at the table.
There are parents who consider it their duty to teach their children the formal etiquette of eating behavior: not to slurp, to be able to use a knife and fork, to know the necessary politeness formulas (“Pass the bread, please”).
But there are parents who understand that a family meal at a common table is one of the most important home situations where a child learns to realize himself in a common space of interactions with other people. Here the child develops an understanding of such basic relations as mine — yours, general — personal, an understanding of his place in a group of people and subordination relations (who is more important in this situation, what can be done and to whom and what cannot). Here he gets acquainted with the problem of subordination and equality, the fairness of the distribution of something, the correlation of his own desires and limited opportunities, he gets used to taking into account both present and absent family members.
For the educator, it is important that all these rather abstract concepts are clearly presented to the child sitting at the table in how the table is set and how the participants in the feast behave. In gu.e. In the material sense, to satisfy hunger, it doesn’t matter whether you drink soup straight from the pan, take it in a bowl to your room, or eat the same soup at the common family table.
From a psychological point of view, these three options are fundamentally different in terms of their internal attitude towards themselves and other people. Each of them forms a certain type of interpersonal relationship.
It is equally evident in many other situations. For example, a child does not like a carrot floating in soup, catches it, and … one puts it on the edge of his own plate, and the other fuses everything that he does not like into a plate for his mother, who finishes her meal, «so that the product does not disappear.» But at the same time, the mother unconsciously strengthens the child’s confidence that if he doesn’t like something, then you can shove it into the living space of another person, shifting responsibility for the unpleasant on him.
For a psychologist, the space of a laid table with family members sitting around is somewhat like a chessboard with pieces arranged in a certain position. Just as an experienced chess player instantly reads the alignment of forces on the board, so a good psychologist will feel the spirit of the family at the table, the peculiarities of the relationship of its members and the position of each in the family group.
In traditional culture, both peasant and noble, merchant, petty-bourgeois, the behavior of family members at the table was strictly regulated. Then they were well aware that the order of seating people at the table, the sequence of serving dishes, behavior during meals symbolically embody the position and significance of each family member, fix a certain type of relationship between them, affirm the inviolability of the family structure. This was especially important for large families, where there is always the problem of organization and management, which is so important for full cooperation in living together,
Since the family usually sat down at the table at least three times a day, the table situation was repeatedly reproduced, and the idea of the structural and role structure of the family was clearly fixed in the minds of the younger generation. It became the basis for future relationships outside the home — in the world.
In the life of a traditional family, the table was the social center of the dwelling, the place where people ate their bread, on which their physical life depended, and at the same time the place around which the family structure was built as a model of human society. Therefore, the attitude to the table as a sacred place was comprehensively regulated in the Russian tradition. It was impossible to put foreign objects and elbows on it, to swear at the table. Bread had to always be on it so that it would not be transferred in the house, etc. In general, the table was perceived as the palm of God extended to people, and in a sense, as a home throne.
As you know, the internal structure of a peasant dwelling reflected the popular ideas about the structure of the outside world — the Cosmos. In the popular mind, the human house was a reduced copy of the universe, a microcosm that reproduced the most essential structural elements of the big world.
Now times have changed. What used to be sacred — sacred, full of worldview meaning, symbolically significant, has now become profane, i.e. lost its semantic height, descended to the level of external everyday phenomena. The concept of sacred objects and places in the house (for example, icons in the red corner) is leaving family life, many people do not have family heirlooms. They are replaced by valuable (in the sense — expensive) things, interior decorations, souvenirs and personally memorable items.
Relations in the family are being democratized and their structure is changing, to the extent that mother and father are losing their special positions. Some children don’t have the words «mom» and «dad» in their vocabulary. They call their parents by their first names, making them, in a certain sense, equal to all other people. Family life often loses important elements of rituality, which were previously structure-forming in the family community. For example, instead of family lunches, dinners, evening tea, everyone eats alone — when he comes and wants to.
Pseudo-democratic ideas of parents, momentary convenience, lack of understanding of the family as a complex whole, give the child the first model of human society — all this leads to the simplification and spiritual decline of many aspects of family life.
However, in the soul of every person, especially a child, there is always the possibility of a reverse course — from the flat-everyday to the deeply significant. This possibility is inherent in the very history of the development of the individual psyche. Indeed, for a small child, the parental home is always the first main world into which he comes, having been born into the world, where he finds a place for himself and learns to live in it.
The world at home is closed and stable. This is a protected space where you can feel safe. A house is always a space organized by people in a certain way with a constant set of things standing in their places, and permanent residents — family members. The home world, like the earthly world, has its own daily cycle. True, for a child, the cycle of daily events is determined not by the movement of the sun across the sky, but by the daily routine of his family — the time of getting up in the morning, eating, changing activities, going to bed. Not the sun, as in folk culture, but the electric light, which parents turn on and off, determines when it is light and people are awake and working, and when it is dark and everyone goes to bed.
But be that as it may, home order — way of life — as the presence of internal principles for organizing the world, at home is of great importance for the child’s psyche. Whether the parents understand it or not, psychologically the house still becomes for the child a subconsciously perceived model of the world order. This is a kind of primary cultural cosmos, with which the child gets acquainted and intuitively absorbs its way of life, and makes its principles: devices his own. They remain coordinates for him, in the system of which the child is inclined to think and act. Growing older, faced with a variety of events in the external world, as well as the inner world of his soul, the child often tries to arrange them in accordance with the principles of worldview that he learned at home.
By the way, as we will see later, the formation of the inner world of the child’s personality at some stages of his development is literally accompanied by flashes of desire to build houses for himself. vividly reflects the stages of construction of the world of the child’s «I».
The home world for a child is always a fusion of the object-spatial environment of the house, family relationships, and their own experiences and fantasies tied to things and people inhabiting the house. One can never assume in advance what exactly in the world of the home will be the most important for the child, what will remain in his memory and affect his future life. Sometimes these are, it would seem, purely external signs of a dwelling. But if they are associated with deep experiences of a personal and ideological nature, then they begin to predetermine life choices.
Peter I, who grew up in Moscow palace towers with low ceilings, all his life demanded that low ceilings be made in his chambers. During his travels in Europe, the rooms where he stayed were covered with a low linen canopy. This reduced the amount of space in height and made the room psychologically comfortable for Peter.
As a teenager, F. M. Dostoevsky, a graduate of the Military Engineering School, lived in the corner bedroom of his company on the second floor of the high Engineering Castle in St. Petersburg. Since then, he always chose rooms for himself, located on the corner of the house, as it were, on the bow of the ship of life, on the tip.
The writer V. V. Nabokov, as a young man, was forced to emigrate with his parental family after the revolution from Russia. He was never able to return to his beloved home on Bolshaya Morskaya in St. Petersburg and to his estate Vyra. All his life he felt like a king, exiled from the kingdom of his own childhood, and never again wanted to have another home. He rented a house, spent the last years with his family in a hotel room in Switzerland. When asked by a journalist why he didn’t buy his own home, because the funds allowed, he answered that a real house, such as in childhood, can no longer be created, and another is not needed.
As we have already said, everything can be significant for a child in the parental home. Sometimes the floor where the family lives is important. It determines the degree of proximity to the ground, the breadth of the opening panorama, the difficulty of climbing into the apartment, some of the fears of children and adults.
The openness of the house in communication with the outside world is also important, which can be expressed both in the number and degree of window curtains, and in the possibility of friends and guests coming.
But still, in the first place in importance, it is necessary to put the home way of life. It is he who helps the child learn to organize the space around him and his time, creates the prerequisites for the development of internal mental structures. In a good family, the child receives this through the stability of the daily routine, the stability of relations between households, the consistency of the demands addressed to him, the ritualism of some aspects of home life (every night reading of a fairy tale, a mother’s kiss before going to bed, etc.).
All this helps the child to feel the boundaries of situations, personal boundaries and self — his own and other people. And most importantly, it gives the child ground under his feet. For a child, especially a small one, it is vital to feel the inviolability and reliable strength of the home world. A native home for a person, by and large, should be what is called a “resource place” in psychology, i.e. to give inner support to the individual, to be a source of her self-confidence and spiritual strength. Then a person will be able to cope with the unpredictability and randomness of many events and will not flinch, because he knows what whales his world is based on.