Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders

Within this architectural study on the spatial configuration of Sigmund Freud's office, Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders offer a critical theoretical examination of surviving archival photographs to determine how vision, power and gender structure this scene of psychoanalysis. Recognising that the original photographs utilise techniques and strategies of street photography, Fuss and Sanders suggest that this private chamber of close and personal exchange, of intimate interiorities, is turned inside out for public display via the photographic images. Furthermore, objects collected within the space signal Freud's own obsession with power, and the positioning of furniture and mirrors is read in terms of the role body language plays as a spatial transaction.

The patient's entry into Freud's office initiates a series of complicated and subtle transactions of power, orchestrated largely by the very precise spatial arrangement of objects and furniture. Freud held initial consultations, between three and four every afternoon, in the study section of his office. Preferring a face-to-face encounter with prospective patients, Freud seated them approximately four feet away from himself, across the divide of a table adjacent to the writing desk. Located in the center of a square room, at the intersection of two axial lines, the patient would appear to occupy the spatial locus of power. As if to confirm the illusion of his centrality, the patient is immediately presented, when seated, with a reflection of his own image, in a small portrait-sized mirror, framed in gold filigree and hanging, at eye-level, on a facing window. As soon as Freud sits down at his desk, however, interposing himself between patient and mirror, the patient's reflection is blocked by Freud's head. Head substitutes for mirror in a metaphorical staging of the clinical role Freud seeks to assume. 'The doctor,' Freud pronounces in Papers on Technique, 'should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him' (12: p 118).¹

Freud's clinical assumption of the function of the mirror, and the substitution of other for self that it enacts, sets into motion the transferential dynamics that will structure all further doctor-patient encounters. In preparation for the laborious work of overcoming their unconscious resistances, patients are required to divest themselves of authority while

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seated in the very center of power. In a reverse panopticon, the most central location in Freud's study (the point from which the gaze normally issues) turns out to be the most vulnerable, as the patient suddenly finds himself exposed on all sides to a multitude of gazes. Viewed from both left and right by a phalanx of ancient figurines (all displayed at eye-level and arranged to face the patient), as well as from behind by a collection of detached antique heads and from in front by Freud's imposing visage, the patient is surveyed from every direction. Power in this transferential scene is exercised from the margins. From the protected vantage point of his desk chair, Freud studies his patient's face, fully illuminated by the afternoon light, while his own face remains barely visible, almost entirely eclipsed by backlighting from the window behind him.

'The process of psychoanalysis,' Freud goes on to remark in Papers on Technique, 'is retarded by the dread felt by the average observer of seeing himself in his own mirror' (12: p 210). The analogy of the mirror, used to describe the process of psychoanalytic self-reflection, makes its first appearance in Freud's work in his reading of the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber. Mirrors figure prominently in Schreber's transvestic identification: 'anyone who should happen to see me before the mirror with the upper portion of my torso bared – especially if the illusion is assisted by my wearing a little feminine finery – would receive an unmistakable impression of a female bust' (12: p 33). And what did Freud see when, alone in his office amongst his classical heads and ancient figurines, he turned to face his own image in the mirror? Freud, too, saw the unmistakable impression of a bust – head and shoulders severed from the body, torso-less and floating, like the Roman head overlooking his consulting room chair or the death mask displayed in his study. His head decapitated by the frame of the mirror, Freud is visually identified with one of his own classical sculptures, transformed into a statuary fragment.

Looking in the other direction Freud also saw only heads. A wooden statue of a Chinese sage sitting on the table between Freud and his patient severs the patient's head in the same way Freud's head is decapitated by the frame of the mirror. From the vantage point of the desk chair, the patient's disembodied head assumes the status of one of Freud's antiquities, homologous not only to the stone heads filling the table directly behind the patient (the only table in the office displaying almost exclusively heads) but also to the framed photographic portraits above them, hanging at the exact same level as the mirror.

For Freud, every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double. In his meditation on the theme of doubling, Freud remarks in 'The "Uncanny"' that while the double first emerges in our psychical lives as a 'preservation against extinction,' this double (in typically duplicitous fashion) soon reverses itself: 'from having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death' (17: p 235). By captivating our image, immobilizing and framing it, the mirror reveals a picture of our own unthinkable mortality.

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Yet, as Freud notes elsewhere, it is finally impossible to visualize our own deaths, for 'whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators' (14: p 289). The mirror that memorializes also reincarnates, reconstituting us as phantom spectators, witnesses to our own irreplaceability. The mirror thus functions simultaneously like a window, assisting us in passing through the unrepresentable space of our violent eradication, and helping us, in effect, to survive our own deaths. This was indeed the function of Etruscan mirrors (so prominent in Freud's own private collection) on whose polished bronze surfaces mythological scenes were engraved. By differentiating between pictorial space and real space, the frame of the Etruscan mirror offers the illusion of a view onto another world. These mirrors, originally buried in tombs, assisted their owners in passing through their deaths: the Etruscan mirror opened a window onto immortality.

Lacan saw as much in his early reflections on the mirror stage. Radically dislocating the traditional opposition of transparency and reflectivity (window and mirror), Lacan instructs us to 'think of the mirror as a pane of glass, you'll see yourself in the glass and you'll see objects beyond it.'² In Freud's office, the placement of a mirror on a window frame further complicates this conflation of transparency and reflectivity by frustrating the possibility of opening up the space of looking that both crystalline surfaces appear to offer. Normally, when mirrors are placed against opaque walls, they have the capacity to act as windows; they dematerialize and dissolve architectural edges, creating the illusion of extension and expanding the spatial boundaries of the interior. But in this highly peculiar instance of a mirror superimposed on a window, visual access is obstructed rather than facilitated. Unlike the glass panes on Berggasse 19's rear entry doors, which allow the viewer's gaze to pass easily along a central axis from inside to outside, the composition of Freud's study window, with the mirror occupying the central vanishing point, redirects the gaze inward. By forcing the subject of reflection to confront an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself, the mirror on Freud's window interrupts the reassuring classical symmetries of self and other, inside and outside, and seeing and being seen that constitute the traditional humanist subject.³

The architectonics of the Freudian subject depends fundamentally upon a spatial dislocation, upon seeing the self exteriorized. It is not only that when we look in the mirror we see how others see us, but also that we see ourselves occupying a space where we are not. The statue that confronts us in the mirror permits us to look not only at but through ourselves to the 'object who knows himself to be seen.'⁴ The domain delimited by Lacan's imago, "the statue in which man projects himself,"⁵ is thus a strangely lifeless one. As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen pictures it in 'The Statue Man,' this mirror world is 'a sort of immense museum peopled with immobile "statues," "images" of stone, and hieratic "forms".' It is 'the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich.'⁶

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What Freud sees in his mirror is a subject who is, first and foremost, an object, a statue, a bust. The 'dread' of self-reflection that Freud describes in Papers on Technique appears to issue from a fear of castration, of dramatic bodily disfigurement. If, as Freud insists in 'Medusa's Head,' the terror of castration is always linked to the sight of something, then it is the sight of seeing oneself seeing that possesses lethal consequences for the figure in the mirror. Like Medusa, who is slain by the fatal powers of her own gaze reflected back to her by Perseus's shield, Freud's narcissistic gaze makes him 'stiff with terror, turns him to stone' (18: p 273). Self-reflection petrifies. Perhaps this is the knowledge that so frightened, and so fascinated, Freud; the realization that the subject's 'optical erection' could only be achieved at the price of its castration, its instantaneous, fatal transformation into a broken relic. (… p 124)

Notes

1 [Editors' note: Earlier in the essay Fuss and Sanders note: 'All citations from the Standard Edition hereafter cited in the text by volume and page number. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans and ed James Strachey, 24 vols, The Hogarth Press (London), 1953-1974.]

2 Jacques Lacan, Seminar I: Freud's Papers on Technique, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed), trans John Forrester, Norton (New York), 1988, p 141.

3 For an excellent discussion of challenges to the traditional humanism of the architectural window, see Thomas Keenan, 'Windows: of Vulnerability', in The Phantom Public Sphere, Bruce Robbins (ed), University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1994, pp 121-41. See also Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, MIT Press (Cambridge), 1994, esp pp 80-2, 234-38 and 283 ff. An earlier discussion of windows and mirrors can be found in Diana Agrest, 'Architecture of Mirror/Mirror of Architecture', in Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice, MIT Press (Cambridge), 1991, pp 139-55.

4 Lacan, Seminar I, p 215; see also p 78.

5 Jacques Lacan, 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', in Écrits, trans Alan Sheridan, Norton (New York), 1977, p 2.

6 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans Douglas Brick, University Press (Stanford), 1991, p 59.

Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders, 'Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office', Joel Sanders (ed), Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1996.

(Excerpt pp 119-24)

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