Space & Psyche

Space & Psyche, a volume commemorating the interdisciplinary ‘Space + Mind’ symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture in 2007, offers “psychoanalytic perspectives on architecture and architectural perspectives on psychoanalysis” (e‐news, 2007). The essays collected here reflect Gaston Bachelard's conception, articulated in his classic text, The Poetics of Space, that inhabited space extends the human body. Such a conception has an affinity with the psychoanalytic premise that human experience and expression emanate from the maternal body. Thus, also presiding throughout this volume, offering the psychoanalytic counterpoint

of ‘psyche’ to Bachelard's ‘space’ is D. W. Winnicott (2005 [1971]), who theorizes that the individual's psyche is always mediated through the ‘other’ of the maternal object, and transitional extensions of that first space.

For Bachelard, space is not primarily a container of three‐dimensional entities. The phenomenology of dwelling has little to do with an analysis of ‘architecture’ or design as such: “It is not a question of describing houses or enumerating their picturesque features and analyzing for which reasons they are comfortable” (1994 [1964], p. 1). Rather, space is the abode of human consciousness and, for Bachelard, the repository of the poetic image; in this he shares Winnicott's investment in the spaces that foster the creative gesture. Bachelard detested modern urbanism because it failed to foster human intimacy. For the psychoanalysts who contribute to this volume, Winnicott's teachings about primary maternal preoccupation with the well‐being of the infant provide a psychological foundation for Bachelard's metaphors of space and human habitation. The dialogue between architecture and analysis in this book draws on a host of disciplines, including “history, art, sociology, political psychology” (p. 10). Thus far the conception of