What Can Psychoanalysis Learn from an Enhanced Awareness of Architecture and Design?

Psychoanalysis is undergoing a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962). The hegemony of ego psychology and its postulates, including Freud's second theory of anxiety, drives, defenses, unconscious fantasy, and conflict and compromise formation is giving way to new models of mind (Wallerstein, 2002). The belief that therapeutic action results from making the unconscious conscious, reconstructing early experience, and resolving conflict is being replaced with perspectives which focus on the nature of the experience of both analysand and analyst of their analytic relationship (Blum, 2003a, 2003b; Fonagy, 2003; Hoffman, 1994). Detailed discussions about how to conduct an analysis once stressed Freud's technique papers; today, such inquiries focus on the two-person analytic situation, and include ideas about the self, object relations, attachment, intersubjectivity, interpersonal experience, and the dialectical nature of social constructions. In this state of flux, where there has been such a dramatic shift in what is considered useful information for analysts reconsidering a theory of mind and a theory of therapeutic action, applied analysts no longer simply attempt to impart analytic wisdom to scholarly pursuits in other fields. Rather, applied analytic investigators now look to the scholarship of other fields for insights which will illuminate the psychoanalytic enterprise. Examples