Beyond Red Lights: Locating the Un-Homed Child

Abstract This paper is based on the researcher’s work at a shelter home with the runaway “street child.” In the Indian subcontinent where religion, gender, family and caste dominate identity structures, within the confines of a “home” exist children unnamed, born out of the social order. Through a clinical presentation and tracing the construction of childhood in Kakar and Nandy, this paper is an attempt to figure this forgotten child in psychoanalytic thought. With this reimagination of a clinic at the gates of homeless homes, psychoanalysis is looked at anew. The aim is to note urban homelessness as not merely a systemic failure, but also an exile from western developmental theory.