Yes you can, you need to create symbolic links to the said directories on the external.
If its only the home folder you'll only need to copy the folder in full and create a Symbolic link to the external drive and delete the old one - pretty easy.
You can do it
through the terminal, however I used "Symlinker" to make life easy on myself
In my case I wanted to be more selective and moved my Photos, Docs, Music and Movies and a ton of selected stuff from Library/Application Support (Logic Library, Spotify Cache etc..). to an external drive, whilst keeping the Desktop and Apps folder and most used Application Support files on my SSD.
Also happy to report that a recent re-install of OSX did NOT break the Symbolic links.