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Originally coming out in Italy in 2014, we welcome the publication in English of this new book by the prominent Italian psychoanalyst Dr Cosimo Schinaia. I have found its title to be somewhat reductive, as the text actually covers a much wider range of topics than Psychoanalysis and Architecture, all of them nevertheless relevant to the practitioners of both these disciplines.
In fact I think this book will be of interest to all those for whom psychoanalysis is more than just a therapeutic profession, as indeed it was for Freud himself, but also a method of inquiry into the ever-surprising functionings of the mind - a tool for the interpretation of a vast variety of human activities, including and especially the creative ones - among which, of course, architecture (‘a frontier profession’ according to Renzo Piano) is here given a place of priority.
Schinaia emphasizes throughout these pages his ‘continuous need to connect the inside and the outside, psychical reality with physical reality’ (p. xxiii). Theoretical frameworks borrowed from the history of art, linguistics, aesthetics, philosophy, literature and, of course, psychoanalysis and architecture pervade the book, with a plethora of quotations from an impressive, and occasionally disconcerting, range of authors.
Chapter 1 (‘The origins of a meeting’) considers the practical and emotional implications of migration, including the author's own from Taranto in southern Italy to Genoa (he calls it, with reference to Kavafis' famous poem, ‘my Ithaca’), the city where he has been living and working for many years as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Elsewhere Schinaia focuses on what he describes as the ‘fertile connections and fruitful contaminations’ (p. 17) among different disciplines - the metaphors, the analogies, the correspondences, or in more general terms the ‘bridges’, which attempt to overcome the artificial barriers conventionally established to provide epistemological