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Just over a decade ago, psychoanalyst Mark Gerald (2011), undertook a project entitled, 'In the Shadow of Freud's Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in their
Offices'. Having made photographic portraits of more than 50 analysts in their offices he concluded that
these professional offices were often so much more than simply a work space. They were a created area in which the deepest wishes and darkest fears could be revealed, held and explored. These rooms were houses for the unconscious world and, as such, typically remained outside of the realm of awareness, being as important as they were … What is it about a psychoanalytic office? How connected, even merged, are we and our patients with these spaces? (Gerald, 2011, p. 436).
The meaning that patients and analysts bestow the room space and the objects therein are often deeply personal. More recently, psychoanalyst Alessandra Lemma (2020) has written about how patients relate to the analyst's physicality or the physical space of the consulting room to connect with ‘an as yet unrealized and wished-for embodied self’ (p. 57) that can only be experienced by identifying with aspects of the analyst's body or of the consulting room. Child therapist Tami Pollak (2022) has written about the body and the consulting room's materiality as a path for developing intersubjective psychophysical space. Positioning a lens over a specific area in these ways enables more to be seen.
Just so, Debbie Wright's recent book enables new and detailed ways of viewing and thinking about the concrete, metaphorical and transferential dimensions of the therapist's workspace, an important and under-developed subject. Whatever and wherever the space in which therapy takes place, it is subject to projections of meaning for patients and therapists, often provoked by the presence and absence of objects, marks, textures, smells, dimensionality, and emotional atmospheres and triggers.
Wright is a psychotherapist and academic in the Department of Psycho