‘Being-at-home’ and homelessness: an interpretive phenomenological analysis of the experiences of Syrian involuntary immigrants living in Istanbul, Turkey

The existing literature on involuntary immigrants predominantly focuses on trauma and trauma-related mental health issues, and there is a need for approaches to therapeutic practice that acknowledge the individually varying experiences of displaced people. Employing interpretative phenomenological analysis, this dissertation addresses this gap in the literature and explores the experiences of Syrian war immigrants living in Turkey in relation to ‘being-at-home’ and ‘homelessness’.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight English-speaking, well-educated participants aged under 45. Interviews primarily focused on participants’ individual experiences of leaving their home and settling in Istanbul. Four superordinate themes emerged from the narratives: experience of loss; crisis; making a new home; and significance of home.

The loss of home was often described as a painful and earth-shaking experience, which changed my participants’ lives radically and forever. While multiple losses at physical, psychological, social and spiritual levels were seen as inseparable to the loss of home and were described at length, there was also a deep sense of an ‘inexplicable gap’, a hole as to what, really, the loss of home meant for them. Loss of home was experienced as something ontological, something that is far larger and more fundamental than the summation of what can be described.

Several psychological complaints and negative feelings were reported during the interviews conducted. Ideas that the world is not a safe, fair place and that other people are not trustworthy and caring, but are instead hostile, self-seeking and discriminating, recurred in the accounts. I argue that these negative emotions and experiences, which result from the ‘ontological’ loss of the sense of home, can be interpreted in the existentialist framework of “life crisis” and through Laing’s concept of “ontological insecurity”. Furthermore, I show that the “crack” in the immigrants’ beings - resulting from once losing their home and experiencing the crisis of getting out of the comfort zone of everydayness - paved the way for a more authentic existence.