Psychoanalysis, Geography and

Psychoanalysis was initiated by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and concerns the clinical techniques revised and contested between and within its various schools of thought, all of which aim to relieve psychological, physical, and sexual forms of suffering. Psychoanalysis differs from other psychotherapies in that it asserts and relies on the interpretability of unconscious mental processes, the contingencies of human sexuality whereby we are not simply regulated by instinct, the human compulsion to repeat painful acts, and our propensity to transfer emotions among ideas, objects, and language.

Psychoanalysis played a formative role in the development of 20th-century philosophy, critical theory, the “Frankfurt School,” poststructural and feminist theories, art criticism, literary theory, and film studies. For the most part, geographers began to engage with psychoanalysis in response to the limitations[Page 388] of the Anglo-American discipline's 1970s and 1980s humanistic and radical theorizations of human subjectivity and agency. Since the mid-1990s, numerous geographers have argued that psychoanalytic categories are thoroughly spatial and used psychoanalysis to explicate the importance of how our attachments, identifications, and dynamic unconscious processes spatially disrupt and maintain sociopolitical antagonism, domination, and division.

There are three main psychoanalytic approaches used in geography. First, geographers have used Freudian concepts to examine how subjectivity, topographies of the body, and unconscious desires can materially and symbolically landscape the urban contexts of racism, sexual politics, and social anxieties. Second, drawing on object relations theory, which deemphasizes the role of the sexual drive by focusing on the embodied psyche's relations to “objects,” geographers have examined how public and private spheres are underpinned by intersubjective processes of exclusion, rejection, purification, and transgression to consolidate hegemonic power through amplifying differences between cultural “selves” and “others.” Third, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concepts of the “imaginary” (alienation and rivalry), the “symbolic” (language and law), and the “real” (trauma and impossibility), as well as the psychoanalytic work of the French feminists Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, have prompted geographers to question the patriarchal and masculinist insistence on distinguishing between real and nonreal spaces, subvert binary conceptions of innate and fixed gender differences, and politicize the roles of fantasy and enjoyment in the ideological dimensions of sociospatial practices.

Recently, some geographers have critiqued the “psychoanalytic turn” in geography for gentrifying the more radical elements of psychoanalytic theory to comply with the discipline's culturalist and social constructionist sensibilities. These geographers' calls to critically embrace the more troubling aspects of psychoanalytic theory, such as the emphasis on a dangerous and paradoxical reciprocity between enjoyment and suffering, seem to be more than timely given the recent worldwide intensification of violence, exploitation, domination, and discrimination that make up the increasingly blurred domains of terrorism, democracy, and morality.