Much recent scholarship in this interdisciplinary terrain has focused on using psychoanalysis as a theoretical tool for interpreting architecture, I am interested here in reversing this relationship and thinking instead about the architectural structures already in place in psychoanalytic theory and practice. What I hope to draw out here are four ways in which architectural space registers in psychoanalysis. This includes topographic understandings of psychic processes and their representation in drawings, the spatial structuring of psychic life itself through the screens and folds of memory, as well as the architectural setting in which the psychoanalytic encounter between analyst and analysand takes place. My interest is in how psychoanalysis’s use of architecture might offer new approaches for understanding the connection between subjects, objects and spaces in architectural research and practice: specifically allowing considerations of buildings and those that design, occupy and interpret them that are material and psychic.

Publication Details: ‘The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Constructions and Associations’, Olaf Knellessen, Dr Insa Haertel Helge Mooshammer (eds), Bauarten von Sexualität, Körper, Phantasmen: Architektur und Psychoanalyse/Ways of building sexuality, bodies, phantasms: Architecture and psychoanalysis (2012).