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Psychoanalysis, from its earliest days, has been interested not only in patients and the neuroses that they construct but also in other human creations—dreams, jokes, works of literature and art, social institutions, and anything that can be understood and appreciated more fully by recognizing its origins in man's inner mental life. In the early years, as with clinical psychoanalysis, the focus of applied psychoanalysis was on content, and thus on literature, biography, and representational art. Just as clinical psychoanalysis expanded to embrace greater concern with form, so did applied psychoanalysis turn its attention to abstract art and music. From the beginning there have been questions about the methodology of all applied psychoanalysis—how can one analyze something that cannot respond, how can one evaluate an interpretation that cannot lead to confirmation or refutation, what is to prevent the unbridled subjectivity of the interpreter from taking over that process? Is applied psychoanalysis a critical discipline or simply another creative art form? This volume does not answer these questions but extends the discussion to another medium—architecture.
“I remember the first time I went to Fallingwater,” architecture critic Paul Goldberger has said of Frank Lloyd Wright's most beloved residential design, “taking a long walk down, looking at it from across the waterfall and you just wanted to sing. Just looked at it and you wanted to start singing some song or doing something” . Goldberger has dedicated his professional life to translating architecture into language, and yet “at the end of the day, there's something that I can't entirely say when it comes to what Fallingwater feels like.”
It is hard not to read Goldberger's response, as editor Jerome Winer recounts it in this collection of essays, without recalling the comment that talking about music is like dancing