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In this impressive work, Lucy Huskinson shows how architectural structures and designs have been seminal in the development of psychoanalytic theories. The use of architectural metaphors and analogies are found in Freud, Breuer, Bollas, Jung and Hillman, et al. Basically every theorist of the personality, its structure and unconscious components, finds him- or herself relying to a greater or lesser extent on architectural metaphors, replete with diagrams, quick sketches and elaborate illustrations of the ‘layers’ of personality and the aetiology of psychopathologies. Huskinson works through these sketches, showing how influential they have been in the history of all varieties of depth psychology. We owe this author a real debt for exploring this dimension of psychoanalysis, because the use of architectural sketches and analogies has become so integral to the discipline that it has remained almost an unconscious component of the field itself. Every teacher of psychodynamic theory sketches architectural designs on the whiteboard in the classroom. But such designs are used so often they are taken for granted and not subjected to the scrutiny that Huskinson provides.
I know from dreams how often the psyche utilises building designs, floor plans and spatial arrangements to express certain patterns that are vital to the structure and dynamics of the personality. We might dream, for instance, of living in a cramped space, discovering an unused room in a house, or feeling lost and disoriented in a cluster of buildings, or dwarfed by an enormous skyscraper, and in each of these images the unconscious is trying to say something about fear,