Psychoanalysis and Architecture

Nothing is more essential to architecture than our experience of it. Psychoanalysis is the study of that inner experience. The first of four sections consists of psychoanalysts encountering architecture. Psychoanalysts Robert F. Harris, Eugene Mahon, and Stephen M. Sonnenberg, give accounts of an individual's inner confrontation with a structure. F. Robert Rodman looks at the relevance for architecture of D. W. Winnicott's theory of the true self. Phil S. Lebovitz explores the process of architects designing houses for themselves. The authors in the second section are architectural scholars who in a variety of ways bring psychoanalysis and architecture together. Steve Pile argues for the relevance of dreams to architecture. Juliet Flower MacCannell examines Sigmund Freud's use of space. Elizabeth A. Danze focuses on the office in which psychoanalytic practice takes place and considers the impact that this has on an unfolding treatment. Peggy Deamer and Stephen Kite look at critic Adrian Stokes, who was a pioneering figure in relating psychoanalysis to architecture. James William Anderson, Jerome A. Winer, and Robert Twombly, the authors in the third section, speak about that most controversial and celebrated of American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright. In the final section, Peter Loewenberg provides a psychoanalytic study of the Bauhaus. Robert Gutman applies a psychoanalytic view of creativity to current architectural practice. Examining a Romanian myth about the construction of about the construction of a particular church. , Ruxandra Ion and Anderson argue that the myth provides an entrée into the inner experience of those who worshiped there. Focusing on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Peter Homans and Diane Jonte-Pace consider how the buildings foster the process of mourning.