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“The architect,” declares Cosimo Schinaia, “transforms emotion into form whereas the psychoanalyst transforms emotion into language” (p. 31). Not to be confused with a previous edited volume by the same name, this author, a psychoanalyst in Genoa, Italy, delves wider and deeper into a fundamental rationale for comparing the ephemeral psychoanalysis project with the concrete, yet evocative, environments that humans construct. Their goals are similar, Schinaia maintains: to synthesize the relationship between the professional and his client and to create a newer, more expansive reality than was formerly imaginable.
Unlike the concept of “applied psychoanalysis” in the arts, which Schinaia calls reductive, his investigation seeks to find psychoanalysis “implied” in architecture rather than what is “applied” to it. To do so, he freely cites philosophy, architectural history and literature, as well as the analytic canon. Included are Bion's and Bollas's critiques of Freud's Roman archeological metaphor, Jung's analogy between buildings and the psyche and Winnicott's spatial concepts of the maternal holding and transforming functions - which feel closest to his book's theme and resonance. The result feels like an endless collection of insights that is at times contemplative and at other times maddingly exhaustive.
What do I mean by contemplative? As Schinaia develops the dialectic between inside and outside and the intersections that arise between them, I found myself drawn back to my own familiar places (homes, offices, institutions and towns), loved or not so much. At times reading Psychoanalysis and Architecture was dreamlike, and I wanted to remain within my reveries - for like a successful building, this pleasurable book can be experienced as maternal holding.
Schinaia accounts for his interest in architecture and psychoanalysis by calling it an odyssey - both personal and universal:
It is the destination at the end of an experiential journey during which the traveler be