When I was watching my 9-year-old niece during the long summer break and we experienced all kinds of things together, such as a video call from my husband, the following dialogue ensued:
My niece: „How long will uncle stay away? Why is he there?“
Me: „He will be there for a week due to his job.“
Her: „Oh! Is he homesick then?“
Me: „Yes, indeed he is.“
Her: „What is that, actually - homesickness?“
Me: „It means that he is longing for a place or person because he feels safe there and we built a happy home together.
Her: „So, do you feel homesick because you are loved?“
Me: „Yes, that‘s how it is.“
Her: „Mhm, so you don’t feel homesick when you are hit.“
I was truly astonished how clearly and distinctly she makes sense of everything she encounters in the world around her. She felt homesick for the first time in her life a couple of weeks ago when she was travelling, but was feeling such emotional distress that her parents had to come and get her early. This is how she learned what being far away from home in an unfamiliar environment means, especially in the calmer evening hours when the day comes to a close. She missed the feeling of being safe and close to her mother which showed in her increased proximity-seeking in the days that followed. Even weeks after this trip, she still grappled with the impact of homesickness on herself and used stories about the way in which other children are growing up to help her process it all.
Moral norms and values have already been internalized and in this way of thinking, my niece classified violence against children as a ruthless exertion of power over wards that is in no way appropriate. Her logic (if I am loved, I will be hugged, not hit) is meaningful in its clear simplicity:
Parental love -> affection -> homesickness
No or questionable parental love -> violence -> no homesickness
Notions of “homesickness” and its conceptualization do have a place in philosophy, often associated with closeness and distance, familiarity and differences/strangeness, longing and amazement and my subjective being in the world. As humans, we are trying to make sense of our being in the world (Heidegger) – just as my niece so beautifully put it. This Being-in-the-world does have a specific place and subject as an existential conception of an individual. It is an existential constitution in a broader context: Me being here or me being there. Homesickness refers to this existential difference that my niece experienced so vividly for the first time in her life. How do I adapt to new places and to the unfamiliar? Why do I feel differently there and why does that make me insecure?
The Austrian essayist Jean Améry (nom de plume for Hans Meyer), who survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz, defined homesickness as becoming a stranger to oneself, an alienation from the self and a loss of identity:
„One no longer knew who one was … I was no longer an I … One must have a home in order not to need it.“1
The creation of one’s identity is influenced by the external environment at home, in which a child develops a sense of self – an “I” and a “We” as a family unit. The process by which the child finds emotional security is along the cultural, social and emotional attachments to a bigger “We”. The separation of my niece from this “We” resulted in her feeling strange about herself. She didn’t know herself anymore in this unfamiliar environment and homesickness in form of feeling insecure, sad and an intense longing ensued. When I am here, I know exactly who I am, but when I am there: who am I then? The Being-in-the-World is based on being familiar with the world around me. Heidegger describes this as an “existential” (which entails a being as being out there). She had lost this basic familiarity with the world around her.
Homesickness experienced as an existential difference of world and being begs the question of the self2, the other and my surroundings. It may be an important hint not only for children but also for adults to practise introspection and to learn something new about oneself.