"When the house is finished, death comes." (Turkish proverb) We associate the house with security and safety. It is part of our longing for the idealized childhood in our parental home and simultaneously symbolizes our own future desires for independence in our own house. However, having one's own house also means being constrained, a form of unfreedom: individuality turns into conformity, freedom into limitation, and security into dependence. If one tries to create a maternal shelter within the house, one eventually discovers, often with an uncanny feeling, that it can also take on the character of a grave. Thus, the house and each of its forms become a crystallization point of a fundamental ambivalent autonomy-dependence conflict that we all know, and which Mathias Hirsch explores: witty and profound - cultural and psychoanalytical. A brilliant analysis.