Psychoanalytic Setting

Definition

The psychoanalytic setting is the interior arrangement in which psychoanalysis is practiced — and, in this wiki's strongest reading, the interior that is part of psychoanalysis rather than its container. Ro Spankie's chapter shows the setting at Berggasse 19 to be doubly constituted: the couch-room "housing the practice of psychoanalysis" (patient lying on the couch, analyst at its head out of sight, an arrangement "intended to create an atmosphere conducive to free association") and the adjoining desk-room — Freud's "inner sanctum" — "framing its theory, the two activities visually connected and reflecting back on each other." Crucially, the setting is not a room but a relation: "the arrangement can be more accurately described through the relationship of its parts rather than by conventional design drawings" — topologically compatible with different "distance, area, or volume – and one could also add style – while retaining its function," which is why "it can be picked up and recreated" in summer villas and in London. After 1939, "the original psychoanalytic setting is hard to locate. It is not simply a physical space, it is also a memory, a method, and a metaphor" — and its reconstructions, though all differing, reveal the setting's key relationship: "the analyst and patient, with the patient lying on the couch and the analyst sitting at the head out of sight."

Key Thinkers

• Ro Spankie — the setting's theorist: topologically portable ("compatible with a number of extensive qualities… while retaining its function"), a "memory, a method, and a metaphor," and — via Freud's mind-diagram — "a model of how his interior functioned" (2018).
• Sigmund Freud — the setting's designer-occupant: the 1908 transplant of "a clinical practice… out of the surgery and into a domestic setting"; the couch from 1891; the desk facing the couch "the visual connection aiding recall" (1891–1938).
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — the couch-room's power reading: the transferential transactions "orchestrated largely by the very precise spatial arrangement of objects and furniture"; the "reverse panopticon" — the setting as built apparatus of vision, power and gender (1996/2006).
• Lee Edelman — the generalizing edge: rooms that perform psychoanalytic operations — the built setting extended beyond the clinic (1996/2006).

Related Concepts

• Psychoanalysis — the theory the setting embodies: "the arrangement of his consulting room and study were an integral part of the instrument."
• Free Association — the operation the setting exists to induce: the couch, the out-of-sight analyst, the "disembodied voice or a listening ear."
• Facilitating Environment — the desk-room's half of the setting: Winnicott's "secure creative space" in which the theory was written.
• Transference — the dynamic the arrangement stages: Fuss & Sanders's "very precise spatial arrangement of objects and furniture" setting "the transferential dynamics… into motion."
• Occupant as Designer — the setting's author: Freud as the occupant whose arranging was the design act.
• Domestic Interior — the setting's host: the clinic transplanted "out of the surgery and into a domestic setting."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the setting's domestic genealogy: Freud "a collector of antique statuary which adorned and, in Benjamin's terms, made his consulting rooms, which were attached to his apartment in Vienna, into a domestic interior" (p. 286) — the setting not designed but collected into being, the bourgeois interior's clinical form; the suite-of-rooms unconscious (entrance hall, drawing-room, censor-watchman, p. 286) as the setting's theory doubling as the psyche's own plan; and the Oedipus complex's force from "the overdetermined place of the family in bourgeois life" — the setting's theory historically conditioned by the room it came from. See the-collector, bourgeois-interior.
• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the founding source: the setting as "a memory, a method, and a metaphor"; the two-room structure (practice-room and theory-room "visually connected and reflecting back on each other"); the topological portability thesis ("it can be picked up and recreated"); the annual summer re-installations (the 1932 Hohe Warte photograph as "proof that Freud considered this arrangement vital to his practice"; Martha Freud in 1934 — "all his pictures and also the majority of his antiquities were in their places"); the 1938 London re-creation "in the same order they had sat on the desk in Vienna."
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the setting's power-geometry: the patient "divest[ed] of authority while seated in the very center of power"; "power in this transferential scene is exercised from the margins"; "Head substitutes for mirror" — the setting as the analytic theory built in furniture, axes, light and mirrors.

Open Questions

• If the setting is "the relationship of its parts" and can be recreated anywhere, what — if anything — is lost in each re-creation? Spankie notes the reconstructions "differ"; Fuss & Sanders read the original's power-geometry from specific photographs. Is there a minimal setting (couch + out-of-sight analyst) beyond which the arrangement stops being psychoanalytic?
• The setting is "also a memory, a method, and a metaphor": which of the three does the contemporary consulting room inherit, now that the couch arrangement is "accepted psychoanalytic practice" but Berggasse 19 is a museum?
• Spankie's setting has two rooms (practice and theory) "visually connected and reflecting back on each other"; psychoanalytic technique texts usually describe only the consulting room. Is the study-desk — where notes are written from memory and theory drafted — a necessary part of the setting, and what would psychoanalysis without the desk-room be?
• Does the setting's portability (topological thinking, via DeLanda) separate the analytic setting from the history of interiors generally — or is every functionally arranged interior (the operating theatre, the courtroom) similarly describable by relations rather than drawings?
• Rice's primary text historicizes the setting twice: the consulting rooms as a collected domestic interior (Benjamin's collector made the setting), and the Oedipus theory drawing its force from the bourgeois family's "overdetermined place." Is the psychoanalytic setting then the bourgeois interior's clinical form — a historically specific room claiming a universal instrument — and can the setting's portability outrun its class history? See the-collector, bourgeois-interior.