Psychoanalysis

Definition

Psychoanalysis is the theory and therapeutic practice founded by Sigmund Freud, centered on the unconscious, repression, the developmental phases (oral, anal, phallic, genital), and the dynamic of wish and defense. For architecture, psychoanalysis offers a "thick" account of selfhood against the "thin" view of standard architectural history: it attends to how the psyche is "extended" onto external objects and spaces, how developmental experience shapes spatial preferences (e.g., the oral phase's empathy for formlessness versus the anal phase's empathy for closed form and control), and how buildings can affirm or provoke unconscious wishes. Abell argues that phenomenology, for all its attention to the body, "lacks a psychical basis for understanding body experience from a psychoanalytic perspective."

Key Thinkers

• Sigmund Freud — the founder of psychoanalysis; the extended psyche; developmental phases.
• John Abell — psychoanalysis as the "thick" view of selfhood for architecture.
• Lee Edelman — psychoanalysis as the analysis of built space: the men's room read through Freud's uncanny (heimlich/unheimlich, "Was will das Weib?") and Lacan's symbolic gaze — the room as "the very site of the symbolic gaze" and "an uncanny space where the gaze of the symbolic order sees male bodies into social meaning" (1996/2006). See uncanny, gaze.
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — psychoanalysis's own room read architecturally: Freud's Berggasse 19 office as the built apparatus of vision, power and gender — the mirror-function assumed by the analyst ("Head substitutes for mirror"), the "reverse panopticon," and "the transferential dynamics that will structure all further doctor-patient encounters" (1996/2006). See transference, mirror.
• Ro Spankie — psychoanalysis as an interior-designed discipline: Strachey's "first instrument for the scientific examination of the human mind" reread so that "the arrangement of his consulting room and study were an integral part of the instrument" — the couch-room housing the practice ("an atmosphere conducive to free association") and the desk-room framing the theory, topologically portable and Winnicott's "facilitating environment" at the desk (2018). See psychoanalytic-setting, free-association, facilitating-environment.
• Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — psychoanalysis as design history's strong hermeneutic (1992/2006): the developmental map applied to rooms and products — Freud's infantile sexuality ("the body is an open, relational field to be mapped and remapped into regions of desire") grounding the claim that "twentieth-century design gradually articulated the bathroom and kitchen as the erotogenic zones of the domestic body"; Ernest Jones's two adult reactions to anal eroticism (fastidious "withholding" vs. productive "giving out") read as the twin design-doctrines of modern cleanliness ("continuous kitchen cabinets, built-in bathtubs, seamless food packages, and streamlined office equipment") and consumerist discard (Frederick's "creative waste"); and Ferenczi's substance-progression (feces → clay → marbles → coins) as the industrial prototype's genealogy — "The hard surface of the finished product retains the direct trace of its soft, globular origins, lodged in its contours like a childhood memory." See bathroom, streamlining, creative-waste, process-of-elimination.
• Anne Troutman — psychoanalysis at house scale, from the inhabitant's side (1997/2006): the dwelling as "This Freudian connection, dividing and connecting inner and outer selves" (editors' headnote); the plan as psyche-map ("conscious securities… visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces"); repression acting on rooms ("repressed fears transform surface into cavity"); Freud's anxiety/fear distinction with birth as the first anxiety; and the house as transitional space assimilating unexpressed anxieties and losses (Winnicott via Adams). See hidden-spaces, fear, transitional-space.
• Jean Baudrillard — psychoanalysis historicized and turned back on itself: "There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy. Hence they have only a kind of boomerang value" — "If psychoanalysis speaks of the unconscious in primitive societies, we should ask about what represses psychoanalysis" (The Mirror of Production, ch. I, "Epistemology I: In the Shadow of Marxist Concepts," pp. 47–48). See primitive-societies-as-alterity, domination-of-nature.

Related Concepts

• Unconscious — the central object of psychoanalysis.
• Repression — the mechanism by which the unconscious is constituted.
• Trauma — the overwhelming experience whose residue psychoanalysis traces.
• Aesthetic Experience — the encounter psychoanalysis interprets through "aeffects."
• Psychoanalytic Setting — psychoanalysis's built body: the two-room interior that is "an integral part of the instrument."
• Primitive Societies as Alterity — the test case that de-universalizes the unconscious: "no unconscious in primitive societies" (ch. I, pp. 47–48).
• Domination of Nature — the genealogy of Law and repression: Law "results instead from the rupture of exchange and the loss of the symbolic" (ch. II, "Lycurgus and Castration," p. 61).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the psychoanalytic register of the object-system: the oral/phallic/anal structuration of the modern interior ("a faecal order founded on… a great anal aggressiveness sublimated into play"); collecting as anal regression and the work of mourning (Fort! Da!); possession as "a tempered mode of sexual perversion"; the robot as asexual slave; and advertising's maternal agency and superego.
• Freud for Architects — psychoanalysis and architectural experience.
• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the psychoanalytic subject as the norm against which raced subjects are measured: within the surface/depth binary, "Baker cannot be the divided subject who is the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry. Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self" (p. 66); Butler's relocation of the "internal core" to the body's surface as the semblance psychoanalysis takes for substance (p. 65); and the domestic interior as psychoanalysis's architectural armature — "an allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants," its "ritualized, sexual dramas" (p. 66). See corporeal-inscription, interiority.
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — psychoanalysis operating at room-scale: Freud's uncanny (the subject "sensing himself unexpectedly observed… view[ing] himself through the eyes of another person or thing that seems… to usurp his subjectivity"; the heimlich TV "turns unheimlich in the bathroom," pp. 107–108); Freud's "Was will das Weib?" as the cultural frame of the question "What Do Men Want?" (p. 107); and Lacan — via Edelman's note 1 — whose "urinary segregation" establishes the phallus "as the token of anatomical difference," against which Edelman reads the stall as "the site of a loosening of sphincter control, evoking… an older eroticism, undifferentiated by gender, because anterior to the genital tyranny that raises the phallus to its privileged position" (pp. 108–109). The room itself does the analysis: the men's room as "the very site of the symbolic gaze" (p. 106) — psychoanalytic structure built, not merely applied. See uncanny, gaze, the-closet.
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the origin case: Freud's own consulting room read as the built analytic apparatus. The mirror-function assumed by the clinician — the doctor "should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him" (Papers on Technique, SE 12: 118) staged architecturally, "Head substitutes for mirror" (p. 117); the transferential dynamics "set into motion" by the "substitution of other for self" (pp. 117–118), with patients required to "divest themselves of authority while seated in the very center of power" in a "reverse panopticon" where "power… is exercised from the margins" (p. 118); the Freudian subject's architectonics — "seeing the self exteriorized," the mirror image as "a subject who is, first and foremost, an object, a statue, a bust" (pp. 119–120); and the clinical "dread" of self-reflection read through castration ("Self-reflection petrifies," p. 120). See transference, mirror-stage, castration-anxiety.
• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the discipline's other half: psychoanalysis as a two-room interior architecture. The couch-room housing the practice — the 1891 patient's-gift couch as "both a piece of domestic furniture and a nostalgic object," the arrangement "intended to create an atmosphere conducive to free association," the patient "draped in that flying carpet for unconscious voyaging," Freud "himself a disembodied voice or a listening ear"; the desk-room ("inner sanctum") "framing its theory, the two activities visually connected and reflecting back on each other"; the whole a topological setting — "capable of being compatible with a number of extensive qualities, such as distance, area, or volume – and one could also add style – while retaining its function. For this reason, it can be picked up and recreated" — and, at the desk where the majority of Freud's 320 publications were drafted, the sixty-five antiquities creating Winnicott's "facilitating environment": "a secure creative space that allowed Freud to think and to write." The couch-side (Fuss & Sanders) and desk-side (Spankie) readings together give psychoanalysis its complete built body. See psychoanalytic-setting, occupant-as-designer, free-association.
• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — psychoanalysis generalized to the designed world: the Three Essays' developmental map ("the sexual zones move from mouth to anus to genitals") made the analytic frame for the whole 1890–1940 object economy — the bathroom/kitchen as "erotogetic zones of the domestic body" (p. 208; see bathroom); Ernest Jones's anal-eroticism reactions as the twin design doctrines (fastidious withholding: "modern design's imperative for cleanliness and enclosure"; productive giving out: "waste becomes the material of art," pp. 210–211); desire "lean[ing] on the alimentary functions," working "in conjunction with – and in excess of – need" (p. 208) as the theory of why hygiene "rapidly exceeded the demands of utility"; and Ferenczi's excrement-to-clay-to-coins sequence as the prototypes' genealogy. Here psychoanalysis is not applied to one room (Berggasse 19) or one typology (the men's room) but to a whole material culture — the strongest claim in the wiki that designed objects are psychic documents (see process-of-elimination, creative-waste, streamlining).
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — psychoanalysis at house scale, from the inhabitant's side rather than the analyst's room. The Freudian frame stated as the dwelling's own structure: "dwelling holds an intimate, mirror-like relationship so that we dwell in the home and the home dwells in us. This Freudian connection, dividing and connecting inner and outer selves, gathers hidden spaces with visible house, and cloaks the visual with other senses such as fear, terror, fright and anxiety" (editors' headnote, p. 356). Repression as an operator on rooms: "Disturbing dreams and repressed fears transform surface into cavity, large into minute, the miniature into the overwhelming" (p. 357). The anxiety theory reported: "Freud distinguished anxiety from fear (Furcht). Anxiety is a reaction to a perception of danger; fear requires a definite object of which one is afraid… He considered birth the first experience of anxiety, later the absence of the mother" (p. 358; no Freud title cited — see source-note Open Questions). And the Winnicottian extension (via Laurie Adams, note 1): the dwelling as "a creative 'space' that defends the individual against the anxiety of being alone" — the house as transitional space. Where the wiki's other psychoanalytic sources read the analyst's room, the washroom or the object-world, Troutman reads the ordinary house as the psyche's own architecture. See hidden-spaces, fear, transitional-space, unconscious, repression.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — psychoanalysis's concepts historicized alongside historical materialism's: Law, Prohibition and Repression are derived from the objectification of Nature rather than from a universal psychic constitution, so that "In this sense law, which is called the foundation of the symbolic order and of exchange, results instead from the rupture of exchange and the loss of the symbolic. This is why there is properly neither Necessity nor Scarcity nor Repression nor the Unconscious in the primitive order, whose entire symbolic strategy aims at exorcizing the apparition of Law" (ch. II, "Lycurgus and Castration," p. 61). The book's demand is reflexive — "Instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis… we bring all the force and questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis" (ch. I, "Epistemology I," p. 49), whence its question "what represses psychoanalysis" (pp. 47–48). See primitive-societies-as-alterity, domination-of-nature.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
• source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies