Psychogeotherapy offers a critical exploration of the roles played by ideas of space and containment in psychotherapy. Employing approaches from psychogeography with a focus on the praxis of ‘aimless walking’, it explores alternate models of therapeutic space and what the author terms ‘psychogeotherapy’.
The book gives a fresh and creative perspective on therapeutic work and its relationship to space, drawing on a range of existing approaches including Freudian, post-Freudian, Jungian and post-Jungian perspectives. With perspectives from various disciplines such as art, social studies, cultural studies and philosophy, the book interrogates the dominant models of containment in psychotherapy and discusses these models from different perspectives to shed new light on classical concepts of therapeutic space and containment in depth psychology and psychotherapy.
This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of analytical psychology, psychotherapy, psychogeography and mental health.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Beginning of the flâneur’s journey
Depth psychology and space
Depth psychology and identity, memory, experience
Containment
Psychogeography
Research questions
Structure
Summary
Chapter 2: Revisiting the foundations: Freud and Jung
Introduction
Topographic and archaeological model of the psyche: S. Freud.
Origins of the topographic model
Theatre of memory
Self-regulatory system
Body-map orientation
Power relations
Archetypal manifestation
Euclidean model of space
Summary: Freud
The well-sealed vessel and dwelling: C.G. Jung
Dwelling and de-structuring
Sacred geometry and maternal space
Building as a process
Summary
Chapter 3: The container as a concept of space
Introduction
Playing within boundaries: sandplay
The nature or beyond boundaries: ecopsychology
Holding and transitional spaces: Donald Winnicott
Between id and ego spaces: Paul Schilder
Manifestation of inside: Adrian Stokes
Chapters 2 and 3: Summary
Chapter 4: The container as a concept of space
Introduction
Containing space – introduction
Thought as meaning
Idealisation
Biological model
Uterine container
The general concept of containing space in depth psychology
Chapter 5: Containing space in depth psychology: moving beyond the fixed image
Introduction
Boundaries and borders
Categories of thinking
Geometrisation and perspective
Feminine space and colonisation
Self-contained and autonomous identity
Uncontained states of mind and defensiveness
Shadow: Claustrum and Panopticon
Summary
Chapter 6: Between containing spaces and new spaces: a critical comparison
Introduction
Experience: between Erlebnis and Erfahrung
Memory: Between Theatre and Mnemosyne
Meanings: between connections and structures
Emergence: between connections and patterns
Space: Between designed space and lived space
Walking as a method: between praxis and theoria.
Chapter 7: Psychogeography as a therapeutic space: features and a case study
Introduction
Psychogeotherapeutic space: features
Recording experiences
Dérive as a new reverie
Transitions and non-bounded space
Without a map, centre or destination
Aesthetical dimension: transformation of perception
Détournement
Creating situations & moments
Playfulness
Sensual and embodied
Discovering the Uncanny
The co-existing unconscious
Interconnectedness
Relationality: the encounter
The socio-political dimension: inside out/ outside in
Case study – ‘The analytic third. Working with intersubjective clinical facts’
Chapter 8: Discussions, limitations and conclusions
Introduction
Discussions and limitations
Conclusions
How can psychogeography change depth psychology?
Memory
Identity
Experience
References
Biography
Martyna Chrześcijańska is a lecturer at London Metropolitan University, School of Social Professions. She completed her PhD in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies.
