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Space and Psyche (Danze & Sonnenberg, 2012) is a collection of essays, emanating from a symposium on space and psyche held in 2007, that uses psychoanalytic approaches to provide new insights about architecture and the built environment. The authors—each distinguished in their own fields—are psychoanalysts, architects, theorists, and architectural historians, all of whom are willing to relax disciplinary boundaries in favor of innovative thinking about architectural and psychic structures.
How is a building like a psychoanalytic situation? Peter Loewenberg, trained as a psychoanalyst as well as historian, has long studied the history of human behavior in modern central Europe. His psychohistorical approach to the past considers the shaping of history by preconscious and unconscious processes. It is, perhaps, no surprise that Loewenberg, who was radically displaced in childhood, (his family fled Nazi Germany from Hamburg to Shanghai to the United States) would be particularly sensitized to fluctuations of space and environment. The protagonists in his essay “Architectural and Emotional Space” include Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and analysts D.W. Winnicott and Wilfred R. Bion.
Winnicott's idea of transitional space, transitional objects, and Spielraum (play space) are fundamental to thinking about object-design and interior architecture. Bion created the metaphor that new spaces could “open up” in an individual's mind, too. Loewenberg plumbs the notion of containment as it relates to psychodynamics and architectural space and brings these complications to the psychodynamics of architecture. He characterizes the Bauhaus as a holding environment where work and play could merge productively, thus engendering new shapes and spaces. On a similarly grand psychological scale, Loewenberg presents Louis Kahn as a modern architect for whom architecture was an intensely introspective process. All three of the architects Loewenberg investigates (Gropius, Wright,