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I believe that the task of inventing better futures may stagger the imagination and paralyze hope, but we cannot relinquish this holy call.
Although Freud thought structurally (early on he employed the word “architecture” to designate the peculiar organization of hysteria; Freud, 1897), his theories never inspired the experimentation in spatial thinkers that they did in narrative and visual artists—among whom filmmakers perhaps hold pride of place. (Lacan is the more usual link with film, but other studies have also emphasized Freud. See MacCannell, 2000.)
True, Freud rarely neglected to mark the site-specificity of the key mental events that set off his speculations—events befalling him or his patients, or even whole civilizations: the Acropolis, Vienna, Thebes, Egypt, Sinai. Yet space hardly seems as crucial to his theory as the newly effracted dimensions Freud discovered in time. Thus we recall his awakening to long-repressed memories when he finds himself on the Acropolis, and not the architectural wonders surrounding him in that spot (Freud, 1936). We focus more on the phobias induced in “Little Hans” by the horses in the streets of Vienna than on the streets themselves, or on the splendors of the Schoenbrunn Palace (although, it too, plays its part in Hans's mental disturbance; Freud, 1909). And we think more about the unconscious desires of the son and his oedipal guilt (or his perverse enjoyment) than about the particular spatial arrangements of his mother's bedroom, although Freud sometimes offers such details (Freud, 1909).
If Freud uncovered the melodramatic return of a repressed ancient Thebes,