Freud for Architects explains what Freud offers to the understanding of architectural creativity and architectural experience, with case examples from early modern architecture to the present.
Freud’s observations on the human psyche and its influence on culture and social behavior have generated a great deal of discussion since the 19th century. Yet, what Freud’s key ideas offer to the understanding of architectural creativity and experience has received little direct attention. That is partly because Freud opened the door to a place where conventional research in architecture has little traction, the unconscious. Adding to the difficulties, Freud’s collection of work is vast and daunting. Freud for Architects navigates Freud’s key ideas and bridges a chasm between architecture and psychoanalytic theory.
The book highlights Freud’s ideas on the foundational developments of childhood, developments on which the adult psyche is based. It explains why and how the developmental stages could influence adult architectural preferences and preoccupations, spatial intuition, and beliefs about what is proper and right for architectural design. As such, Freud for Architects will be of great interest to students, practitioners, and scholars in a range of disciplines including architecture, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.
Series editor's preface
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
The psyche, aesthetic experience, and architecture
Reading Freud, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical practice
Social influence, psychotherapeutic design, wild analysis, and architectural "aeffects"
Outline of the book
2. Freud and modernity: selfhood and emancipatory self-determination
Freud and Vienna: modernity and culture
Contrasting architectural preferences in fin-de-siècle Vienna
The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900
Psychical selfhood and self-determination
Trauma, repression, architecture of screen memories, remembering, repeating, and working through
Cultural screens, disconnection, negation, and affirmation
Conclusion
3. Aesthetic experience: the object, empathy, the unconscious, and architectural design
Unconsciously projecting oneself and intuiting the shape or form of an art object: Semper, Vischer, Schmarsow, Wölfflin, Giedion, and Moholy-Nagy
Stone and phantasy, smooth and rough
Inside-outside corners, birth trauma, and character armor
The turbulent section and the Paranoid Critical Method
Asymmetric blur zones and the uncanny
Conclusion
4. Open form, the formless, and "that oceanic feeling"
Architectural formlessness, not literal formlessness
Freud and the spatialities of the psychical apparatus
Phases of psychical development in childhood
The oral phase
Repression
Blurred zones and architectural empathy for formlessness
Conclusion
5. Closed-form, rule-based composition and control of the architectural gift
The second phase of development, the anal phase, and struggles over control of a gift
Threshold practices: isolation, repetition, procedures for handling objects, and diverting impulses
A very brief history of closed-form, rule-based composition, and control of the architectural gift
House II
Conclusion
6. Architectural simulation: wishful phantasy and the real
The third phase of development, the phallic phase: a wish and overcoming prohibitions against the wish
Simulation, wishes, and world views
"Vertical Horizon" and the plot of phallic phantasy
Conclusion
7. Spaces of social encounter: freedoms and constraints
The last phase of development in childhood, the genital phase, and the search for obtainable objects
Open slab versus regime room: empathy for freedom versus constraint in spaces of social encounter
Conclusion
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Index
Biography
John Abell, PhD, specializes in modern architectural design and urban design critical theory, particularly as these intersect with aesthetic experience, material craft, and design technologies.
