Psychoanalysis, Geography and

Psychoanalysis is a discipline founded by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) at the beginning of the 20th century and subsequently developed by analysts such as Anna Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Donald Winnicott. Psychoanalysis consists of theories of human subjectivity and therapeutic practices that are primarily concerned with the amelioration of neurotic symptoms. It differs from conventional psychiatry and cognitive-behavioral therapies in its use of free association as a technique for accessing unconscious mental processes, its insistence on the importance of sexuality in the formation of psychical conflict, and its refusal to equate the ego with the subject.

In Freudian-Lacanian analysis, the analyst attempts to position himself or herself as a screen for the analysand's unconscious projections. Instead of engaging in conventional conversation, the analyst offers only enigmatic remarks [Page 2299]and polyvalent interpretations in an attempt to rouse the analysand's curiosity and bring his or her unconscious desire to the fore. The alleviation of psychical suffering that analysis aims for occurs through the eventual articulation of the analysand's unconscious desire. This includes the analysand's recognition of himself or herself as a “split subject”—that is, forever divided between the conscious ego and the unconscious, as well as by the gap between language and desire. For Lacan, analysis concludes only when the analysand comes to terms with his or her “fundamental fantasy,” or the unconscious beliefs that structure the self's relationship to reality.

Psychoanalytic concepts such as the unconscious, the gaze, the Other, and the pleasure principle have had an indelible impact on the development of 20th-century literary theory, Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, art history, and film criticism. Geography's engagement with psychoanalysis began in the 1990s with explorations of the spatiality of psychoanalytic categories such as the unconscious and discussions of the psychical dimensions of sociospatial phenomena. Psychoanalytic geography has thus far followed three main trajectories. First, geographers have used Freudian dream analysis to analyze cities through the unconscious desires and fantasies that create and sustain them. Geographers have also employed Freud's formulation of the Oedipus complex to illustrate how racial oppression under slavery was invested with repressed sexual desires within the slave-holding family. Second, geographers have used object relations theories to read sociospatial exclusions such as ethnic and economic segregation as part of processes of “othering,” where dominant groups seek to produce a purified cultural “self” as against an excluded “other.” In concert with this reading, geographers have looked to object relations’ concept of “potential space,” where children use objects such as pacifiers or blankets in ways that blur the distinction between self and object—interior and exterior—as a way of reconfiguring their understandings of space. Finally, geographers have drawn on Lacanian concepts of “extimacy,” where subjectivity and emotions are located outside the body, as well as his notion of “jouissance,” which is enjoyment experienced as suffering, to explain how social phenomena such as violence and racism cannot be entirely reduced to social constructions but are always constituted through unconscious desire and anxieties about the Other.

More recently, some geographers have argued for the necessity of engagement with psychoanalytic methodologies. Some concrete proposals for methods have included “sandplay,” where participants create a “potential space” by sculpting forms in sand with the researcher, to facilitate discussions of spaces and memory. Geographers have also debated using psychoanalysis to analyze interviews, though they have also cautioned that while psychoanalytic interpretation of interview data may be useful, geographers should not attempt to psychoanalyze their research participants.

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