96: Place: Identity and Belonging

Show Notes
In this episode, Simon Western is joined by Daniel B. Frank and Caro Bainbridge to explore how our connection to place shapes who we are, how we relate to others, and how we make sense of the world. They share stories of growing up in Chicago and Liverpool, revealing how personal and collective histories are held within the places we call home.
The conversation moves between the intimate and the systemic. Dan and Caro reflect on how certain streets evoke safety or sorrow, how schools have taken on roles far beyond education, and how cultural roots are both grounding and restrictive. They examine the emotional weight of returning to one’s childhood city, and the strangeness that can accompany that return.
With digital life pulling people away from physical presence and history, the episode raises timely questions about what it means to belong - and how identity is shaped in an era of mobility, forgetting, and cultural fragmentation.

Key Reflections

• A sense of place gives structure to identity and meaning to memory. 
• Emotional ties to place can be nurturing or suffocating—or both at once. 
• The same place is experienced differently depending on one’s history, role, and identity. 
• The legacy of slavery and colonialism shapes how some communities relate to home. Being physically present in a place doesn't always mean belonging to it. 
• Schools are now expected to hold emotional, moral, and community roles once carried by families.
• Digital technology creates new forms of disconnection, despite increased connectivity.
• Living well includes being present - to place, to people, and to time.

Keywords
sense of place, identity, displacement, cultural connections, history, emotional well-being, modernity, community, education, technology

Brief Bios
Daniel B. Frank, Ph.D. is a graduate of Francis W. Parker School in Chicago where he has been has been its Principal for over 20 years and has been a senior administrator there since 1988.  He is the founding Executive Editor of the international education journal Schools: Studies in Education, which is published by the University of Chicago Press, and has served as Executive Director of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations.

Caro Bainbridge works at the intersection of psychoanalysis, culture and organisational life. She is an organisational consultant, leadership development expert and executive coach, known for bringing depth insight to complex systems and supporting individuals and teams as they navigate change, uncertainty and transformation. Her practice is grounded in a long academic career: she is Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis & Culture, a former editor of Free Associations and of the film section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and co-editor of Routledge’s Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture book series. Caro is a Fellow of the RSA and a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. She is widely published in the academic context, and has recently launched The Culture Fix on Substack, where she explores the emotional and symbolic currents shaping contemporary life. Her work is animated by a belief in the generative potential of thresholds and transitions - a perspective shaped, in part, by her daily walks near Antony Gormley’s Another Place, where art, nature and thought meet at the water’s edge.