Unconscious

Definition

The unconscious, in Freud's psychoanalysis, is the region of the psyche composed of wishes, memories, and drives that are repressed from conscious awareness yet continue to shape thought, feeling, and behavior. For architecture, the unconscious opens a dimension "where conventional research in architecture has little traction" (Abell): architectural preferences, spatial intuitions, and beliefs about proper design are not merely rational or cultural but are shaped by early developmental experience and the projection of the psyche onto external objects. Freud's late formula — "the psyche is extended" — means that "human experience is always influenced by the projection of the internal psyche outward onto relations with objects in the external world" (Abell). Architecture is thus a field of "aeffects": buildings can affirm unconscious wishes or function as unwelcome reminders of them.

Key Thinkers

• Sigmund Freud — the unconscious; the extended psyche; developmental phases.
• John Abell — the unconscious and architectural creativity, preference, and "aeffects."

Related Concepts

• Psychoanalysis — the discipline that theorizes the unconscious.
• Repression — the mechanism that constitutes the unconscious.
• Trauma — the unconscious residue of overwhelming experience.
• Aesthetic Experience — the encounter that the unconscious inflects.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Freud for Architects — the unconscious and its architectural significance.
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the unconscious given a floor plan: "Its interiors are a map of the conscious and unconscious, with conscious securities and insecurities visible in the main rooms, and unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces" (p. 356) — the unconscious located in the house's peripheral spaces (see hidden-spaces); meaning assigned "consciously and unconsciously… to every surface, every cavity, visible and invisible until certain types of spaces become associated with specific feelings and begin to form pockets or sites for the contents of our inner lives" (p. 359) — the unconscious as co-author of every room's meaning; and repression's spatial operation ("repressed fears transform surface into cavity," p. 357). Where Abell gives the unconscious its architectural theory, Troutman gives it its address: the rooms no visitor enters. See psychoanalysis, repression, hidden-spaces.