Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office

Author: Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; original 1996) Source type: chapter

Raw file: raw/chapters/fuss-sanders-2006-berggasse-19-freuds-office.md

Summary

Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders's "Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office" — first published in Joel Sanders's Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996; © Princeton University School of Architecture; the Intimus excerpt is pp. 117–124 of Taylor & Preston's 2006 anthology, here pp. 117–120) — is an architectural study of Sigmund Freud's consulting room at Berggasse 19, Vienna, conducted through a "critical theoretical examination of surviving archival photographs" to determine "how vision, power and gender structure this scene of psychoanalysis." Reading the office's furniture, mirrors and collection of antiquities as an orchestrated apparatus, Fuss and Sanders show the patient's entry initiating "a series of complicated and subtle transactions of power": seated at the apparent center of the room, the patient is in fact the most watched and most vulnerable figure in it — a "reverse panopticon" in which "power in this transferential scene is exercised from the margins" — while Freud, backlit and "barely visible," assumes the function of the mirror his desk interposes ("like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him"). The essay's culminating movement turns the analysis on Freud himself: what he saw in his own mirror was a bust — "head and shoulders severed from the body," a statuary fragment among his antiquities — so that self-reflection emerges as the uncanny scene of doubling and petrifying self-spectatorship, where the subject's "optical erection" is achieved "at the price of its castration."

Key Claims

The patient's entry into the office initiates "a series of complicated and subtle transactions of power, orchestrated largely by the very precise spatial arrangement of objects and furniture" — power operating at the scale of furniture placement, not architectural plan (p. 117).
Freud held initial consultations (three to four every afternoon) face-to-face in the study section, seating prospective patients "approximately four feet away from himself, across the divide of a table adjacent to the writing desk" (p. 117).
The patient, "located in the center of a square room, at the intersection of two axial lines," appears "to occupy the spatial locus of power" — an apparent centrality that the rest of the arrangement reverses (p. 117).
The small portrait-sized mirror in gold filigree, hung at eye-level on the facing window, immediately presents the seated patient with his own reflection; the moment Freud sits at his desk, "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" — the visual staging of Freud's dictum that 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) (p. 117).
The clinical assumption of the mirror's function, "and the substitution of other for self that it enacts, sets into motion the transferential dynamics that will structure all further doctor-patient encounters" (pp. 117–118).
Patients are required to "divest themselves of authority while seated in the very center of power" — the spatial paradox of the analytic setting (p. 118).
"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 left and right by "a phalanx of ancient figurines (all displayed at eye-level and arranged to face the patient)," from behind by "a collection of detached antique heads," and from in front by "Freud's imposing visage" (p. 118).
"Power in this transferential scene is exercised from the margins" — the desk chair, not the center, is the seat of power (p. 118).
The analyst's optical regime: from his protected vantage point Freud studies a 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" — illumination as exposure, opacity as analytic power (p. 118).
The mirror analogy for psychoanalytic self-reflection first appears in Freud's reading of the Schreber memoirs, whose transvestic identification Fuss and Sanders quote at length ("anyone who should happen to see me before the mirror… would receive an unmistakable impression of a female bust," SE 12: 33) (p. 118).
Freud before his own mirror likewise "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" (p. 118).
The gaze reverses again toward the patient: the Chinese sage statue on the table "severs the patient's head in the same way Freud's head is decapitated by the frame of the mirror," so that from 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… but also to the framed photographic portraits above them" (p. 118).
"For Freud, every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double." The double of "'The "Uncanny"'" first appears as "a preservation against extinction" but reverses: "from having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death" (SE 17: 235) (p. 118).
One's own death cannot be visualized: "whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators" (SE 14: 289). "The mirror that memorializes also reincarnates, reconstituting us as phantom spectators, witnesses to our own irreplaceability" — it "functions simultaneously like a window" (p. 119).
The Etruscan mirrors in Freud's own collection — engraved with mythological scenes, originally buried in tombs — "assisted their owners in passing through their deaths: the Etruscan mirror opened a window onto immortality" (p. 119).
Lacan's early reflections on the mirror stage "radically dislocat[e] the traditional opposition of transparency and reflectivity (window and mirror)": "think of the mirror as a pane of glass, you'll see yourself in the glass and you'll see objects beyond it" (Lacan, Seminar I, p. 141) (p. 119).
Normally mirrors on opaque walls "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" — the mirror occupying the central vanishing point "redirects the gaze inward" (p. 119).
"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" (p. 119).
"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" (p. 119).
Lacan's imago is "the statue in which man projects himself" (Écrits, p. 2); Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's "The Statue Man" pictures this mirror world as "a sort of immense museum peopled with immobile 'statues,' 'images' of stone, and hieratic 'forms'… the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich" (p. 119).
The "dread" of self-reflection in Papers on Technique "appears to issue from a fear of castration, of dramatic bodily disfigurement": if, as "Medusa's Head" insists, 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, slain by her own gaze reflected back by Perseus's shield, Freud's narcissistic gaze "makes him 'stiff with terror, turns him to stone' (SE 18: 273). Self-reflection petrifies" (p. 120).
The subject's "optical erection" could be "achieved… only at the price of its castration, its instantaneous, fatal transformation into a broken relic" (p. 120).
(Editors' headnote) The original photographs "utilise techniques and strategies of street photography," so that "this private chamber of close and personal exchange, of intimate interiorities, is turned inside out for public display via the photographic images"; the objects collected in 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" (p. 117).

Connections

Concepts: psychoanalysis · transference · mirror · mirror-stage · the-double · castration-anxiety · uncanny · gaze · panopticon · voyeurism · masculinity · interiority · inside-outside-dialectic · humanism · power · privacy · being-toward-death · architectural-photography · perspective (the mirror as the study's "central vanishing point") · white-cube (the mirror world as "immense museum") Authors: Diana Fuss · Joel Sanders · Sigmund Freud (Papers on Technique, "The 'Uncanny'", "Medusa's Head", the Schreber case) · Lee Edelman (the parallel Stud essay — mirrors substituting for windows) · Taylor & Preston (Intimus editors) · Beatriz Colomina (Privacy and Publicity, cited in note 3) — Jacques Lacan, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Daniel Paul Schreber, Thomas Keenan and Diana Agrest cited but not paged (see log) Debates: power-and-space (Position O: the reverse panopticon) · phenomenology-vs-psychoanalysis (Position C companion: Freud's own office as the built analytic apparatus) · truth-and-illusion (Position H: the mirror that blocks the window) Related source notes: Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the sibling essay from Stud: Architectures of Masculinity: mirrors substituting for windows, the mirrored room's self-reflexive containment · Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the same room's other half: Spankie reads Freud's study from the desk-side (writing, memory, the sixty-five objects as a "facilitating environment") where Fuss & Sanders read it from the couch-side (vision, power, gender) — together, the couch-room and the desk-room as one two-room apparatus · Freud for Architects (Abell 2020) — the psychoanalytic apparatus for architecture · A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the domestic interior as "an allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants" · Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — mirrors and the childhood interior's body–object dialogue · The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992) — the uncanny's architectural theory · Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the Intimus editors' framing program

Direct Quotes

"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." (editors' headnote, p. 117)

"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." (editors' headnote, p. 117)

"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." (p. 117)

"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." (p. 117)

"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.'" (p. 117; Freud, SE 12: 118)

"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." (p. 118)

"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." (p. 118)

"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." (p. 118)

"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." (p. 118)

"For Freud, every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double." (p. 118)

"The mirror that memorializes also reincarnates, reconstituting us as phantom spectators, witnesses to our own irreplaceability." (p. 119)

"These mirrors, originally buried in tombs, assisted their owners in passing through their deaths: the Etruscan mirror opened a window onto immortality." (p. 119)

"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.'" (p. 119; Lacan, Seminar I, p. 141)

"But in this highly peculiar instance of a mirror superimposed on a window, visual access is obstructed rather than facilitated." (p. 119)

"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." (p. 119)

"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." (p. 119)

"It is 'the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich.'" (p. 119; Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, p. 59)

"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.' Self-reflection petrifies." (p. 120)

"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. 120)

"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.'" (p. 118; Freud, SE 17: 235)

"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.'" (p. 119; Freud, SE 14: 289)

Open Questions

The excerpt breaks off mid-argument (the "(… p 124)" marker): what does the unexcerpted remainder of the essay — the further photograph analysis, the gender argument Stud promised, the rest of the castration discussion — add?
The editors' headnote promises a street-photography reading of the archival images ("turned inside out for public display via the photographic images"), but the excerpt's body barely touches the photographs themselves: how does the photograph (as opposed to the room) carry the essay's argument about privacy and publicity (cf. Colomina's Privacy and Publicity, note 3)?
The patient's disembodied head becomes "homologous" to Freud's antiquities — the consulting room functioning as a museum whose newest exhibit is the patient. Berggasse 19 is now the Freud Museum: does the house-museum complete the essay's reading, with the visitor occupying the patient's seat among the collection? (Spankie's "Lines of Enquiry" (2018) now supplies the museum evidence: the emptied Vienna rooms exhibiting Engelman's photographs, the rope-off desk in London, and the re-created arrangement — see Lines of Enquiry and house-museum.)
The essay reads Freud's mirror as a scene of transvestic identification (via Schreber) and castration (via Medusa) — how far does the Stud frame (architectures of masculinity) extend into the unexcerpted remainder, and does the office "design" masculinity the way Edelman's men's room does?
Lacan's mirror-as-pane-of-glass and the mirror-on-window: is there a general theory of the mirrored interior's two regimes (mirror-as-window expanding the interior; mirror-as-window blocking it) waiting to be built from Edelman's men's room, de Wolfe's mirrored walls and this study?
Fuss and Sanders read power "exercised from the margins" of a centrally seated patient; Foucault's panopticon (and Edelman's dispersed variant) place power at the margins differently again. Is the "reverse panopticon" a third geometry of the gaze — centered vulnerability, marginal mastery — and what room-types produce it?