John Hill has lived in Switzerland for more than 40 years. He returns to Ireland almost every year and says he's at home in both places. The concept of home is particularly important to him: his book At Home in the World: Sounds and Symmetries of Belonging explores definitions and experiences of home. It's useful for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how emigrants' sense of home changes over time.
“For many people home has become a place between lands, people, families, relationships, and is no longer defined by one family, one house, one nation, one culture. The challenge is to see it as a process defined by the circumstances,” Hill says.
“Even in my own family there are nine nationalities,” he says. “There is a whole concept now around children from totally different nationalities constantly translating different heritages and identities in a process of becoming rather than a state of being.”
Hill is a Jungian psychoanalyst; we meet in Dublin while he is in Ireland to talk about forgiveness at a Jungian conference at Glenstal Abbey, in Co Limerick. His therapeutic encounters have given him a keen insight into human nature.
“Having worked with people for 45 years, I see that, even if the cultural language and formulations are different, we are all struggling with the same problems – anxiety, depression, obsessions, relationships – and the changing circumstances of life: youth, middle age and facing death,” he says. “Very often the people who come to me are quite sensitive and more vulnerable. They reflect a lot on what life is about, looking for meaning and spirituality in a very secular world.”
Hill describes his own background as Anglo-Irish; he went to boarding school – first in Co Wicklow, then at Glenstal – followed by degrees in philosophy at University College Dublin and the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and a diploma in Jungian psychoanalysis in Zurich.
“The Anglo-Irish culture was in a process of diminishing and belonged to a society that didn’t have much of a future,” he says, “I left that world.”
Hill says his concept of Irishness comes from within rather than being defined solely by his country of birth. “I have a deep love of this beautiful land, but I have established roots in Switzerland. Home is a sense of belonging that I feel when I go away from Switzerland and Ireland.
“I notice images of the land I left coming up in the unconscious: the sea, the hawthorn bushes blowing in wind and the gentle hills of Ireland, as well as the jagged mountains of Switzerland, the melancholic lakes and the beautiful Alpine villages.”
We can also experience home through taste. “I love apple tart,” Hill says, “and when I’m away from Switzerland it’s the nice chocolates I miss. Your sense of home can have a very sensuous basis.”
He admits to a certain amount of homesickness. “One way of internalising this was by reading the old myths and history of Ireland. By doing this I could appreciate the depth of Irish culture, so gradually Ireland became a function of the consciousness, something gentle and mild.”
The typical Swiss personality is in stark contrast to the Irish one. “Swiss people are very aware of their boundaries, and it takes some time before you get to know them, whereas Irish people are very quickly inside you, with very few boundaries – but you can ask yourself if you really know that person.”
