A Metapsychological Approach to the Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

… now comes our revelation that man conceives nothing higher than the soul of man himself and when he interprets himself from within, his outward expression will be all the heaven he could imagine and so desire. We call him thus, in himself, great architecture.

If one attempts to respond to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright in a purely emotional manner, the impression is gained of a powerful force, an intrinsic vitality, a primitive energy-charged truth. One perceives an expression of something fundamental in the human psyche. Samona, in discussing influences on Wright, notes that, “Whatever is drawn into Wright's art is, in fact, transfigured and resolved, recast in the crucible of the human spirit giving vital form to structure.”14 The present paper is concerned with the nature of this “crucible of the human spirit,” which becomes manifest in Wright's architecture.

In general, the psychoanalytic approach to creative art has been one of the analysis of content. The expression in art of unconscious wishes has been amply demonstrated in terms of both individual and cultural development.^6,7 Ernst Kris, however, has written about the thinking process as differentiated from the content in artistic creation, giving particular emphasis to the role of controlled ego regression.11 This approach is related to recent theoretical concerns with ego organization rather than the more classical concern with content as derivative of unconscious processes.