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.

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."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Freud for Architects — psychoanalysis and architectural experience.