Books like House as a mirror of self by Clare Cooper Marcus

Bill Bryson’s *At Home* explores the evolution of domestic life, tracing how commerce, technology, and culture have shaped the rooms we inhabit.

Alain de Botton explores how the quality of our physical surroundings shapes happiness, combining philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology to ask what makes a building beautiful.

A sweeping exploration of the evolving concept of home, tracing how cultural shifts and architectural innovations from the Middle Ages to modern design shape our private spaces.

"The meaning of things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam022/81001443.html.

In Transformation: Emergence of the Self, noted analyst and author Murray Stein explains what this process is and what it means for an individual to experience it. Transformation usually occurs at midlife but is much more complicated than what we colloquially call a midlife crisis. Consciously working through this life stage can lead people to become who they have always potentially been. Indeed, Stein suggests, transformation is the essential human task. Stein first details how this process of transformation emerges and develops in an individual. Why does this transformation occur, and, more specifically, why does it so often occur in midlife? Using the examples of poet Rainer Maria Rilke and psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, Stein illustrates the transformation process and shows the role of images and intimate relationships in suggesting new ways of thinking and living. Finally, Stein examines the process in the lives of three important people - Jung, Picasso, and Rembrandt - whose experiences of transformation led to even greater creativity and freedom.

Opening a radically new and original path into history, Simon Schama explores the scenery of our Western culture, both real landscapes and landscapes of the mind that have given us our sense of homeland, the dark woods of our imagined origins. What unfolds is a series of compelling journeys through space and time: from the ancient woodland of Poland, a symbol over the centuries of national endurance, through the forest birthplace of the German psyche, to the Big Trees of Yosemite that gave a new nation its holy past. Through all of history, from pre-classical antiquity to the Third Reich and beyond, Schama uncovers the myths and memories that have stamped themselves on our most basic social instincts and institutions: territorial identity, the wild and domestic, mortality and immortality.