Architects design the spaces in which we live and work, celebrate and remember, worship and compete. Psychoanalysts focus on our unique inner lives—the freedom to dream, think, create, and feel. What about the interaction of these two realms, internal and external space?
The 2003 annual conference of the Lucy Daniels Foundation, held April 5-6 in Raleigh, N.C., challenged its featured speakers—architects and analysts—to expose the intricate design of their work and to explore how the self is expressed through the structures we create and how the self is shaped by the structures we inhabit.
Lucy Daniels, psychologist, writer, and philanthropist introduced the conference:
For those of you who've been so lucky … to never have had to fight for emotional freedom, let me define it more specifically. Emotional freedom is the capacity to be aware of all your feelings—joy, despair, shame, excitement, guilt, fear, hatred, sadness, pride—and stand all your feelings without being forced to behave any certain way by them. That is, free to both feel and to choose your response to those feelings, including the alternative to not act.
Daniels referred to psychoanalysts as “expert clutter busters of our inner space” and asked all of the participants to consider the ways in which we can create internal and external spaces that foster emotional freedom.
Eugene J. Mahon, a New York City psychoanalyst and writer, delivered “The Freud-Vitruvius Dialogue,” an imagined conversation between the great Roman architect and the father of psychoanalysis as the latter lay dying:
Freud: Our dreams are haunted houses we sleep in, and when we wake the ghosts go on our rounds, subtle, invisible, not like sun-cast shadows but taking our full measure nonetheless.
Vitruvius: It's blind fear that diminishes our measure. … Anxiety should be a signal, not a warning, as you put it, Sigmund.
Freud: You know me better than I know myself Vitruvius. Yes, yes, yes, fear unanalyzed can make a single-room occupancy (a vile phrase if ever there was one) out of all the spacious chambers of the human heart!
Vitruvius: Fear, the most neurotic architect of all, you mean.
Michael Rotondi and Merrill Elam, internationally recognized architects, illustrated their talks with slides of building projects evolving from first ideas through completion. Rotondi described how analysis and meditation enriched his development as a person and architect. He gave a moving presentation of the collaborative process involved in the design of a new campus for Gleska University, a Native American college built on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Rotondi and his colleagues used the traditional stories of the Lakota Sioux elders to inform design decisions. They created ways for the students to relive old rituals while moving in and among the campus buildings; for example, they aligned the buildings with the orbits of the sun and moon.
Daniels gave F. Robert Rodman, a psychoanalyst and writer, credit for suggesting the conference's theme. A Lucy Daniels Foundation advisor and author of a recently published biography of Winnicott, Rodman addressed the conference about his search for the human essentials of architecture.
Heather Craige, M.S.W., is a psychoanalyst in private practice, treating adults and children in Raleigh, N.C. She coordinates the evaluation and follow-up studies of creative writers who participate in the Lucy Daniels Foundation's Treatment and Research Program.
Architecture, he proposed, is a setting that provides security for the disorderly world inside and between people:
It has been theorized that in strong human relationships there is always an urge to destroy the other and that the fact that the other person continues to be there, visible and functional, accords him or her special status, the capacity to be of use…. The urge to destroy comes, some of us think, from recognition of the fact that what is out there in the world is beyond one's sovereign control…. One thing that could probably be agreed upon is that the built environment, by its very survivability, provides a reliable setting for the disorderly inner lives that we all lead. The built environment is distinguished by its structural presence, its quality of survivability. … The ongoing non-destruction of the built environment reassures us.
Artist Anne-Marie Levine, whose “Box Poems” were on exhibit throughout the conference, was interviewed by Daniels about the process that led to the creation of these miniature rooms. Art historian and foundation advisor Donald Kuspit made comments connecting and integrating the diverse presentations, which led into a panel discussion and dialogue with the audience. The conference was punctuated by several meals and a reception on Saturday evening, providing informal opportunities for analysts and architects to meet and exchange ideas.
In “The Freud-Vitruvius Dialogue,” Freud implores Vitruvius: “Maybe you can build a home for psychoanalysis, where no emotion will be ashamed to live and even ambiguity can rest from, and rest in, its confusions.” Within its celebrated post-modern building and through its unique programs of psychoanalytic treatment, research and education, the Lucy Daniels Foundation has created such a home for the psychoanalytic exploration of creativity and the pursuit of emotional freedom.
[More information on the Lucy Daniels Foundation appears on page 33.]
The Lucy Daniels Foundation is a private, nonprofit organization that fosters personal development, emotional freedom, and a deeper understanding of creativity through education, outreach, and a psychoanalytic treatment and research program.
Writer and clinical psychologist Lucy Daniels established the foundation in 1989 to provide a means for creative people to learn how to cope with inner conflicts and to overcome psychological obstacles to self-expression.
A national conference that features internationally renowned presenters is held each spring. Additional program offerings include “Dynamic Discourse,” an intimate discussion series with creative individuals from a broad variety of disciplines; an annual lecture series on art and psychoanalysis, featuring nationally prominent scholars, co-sponsored by the North Carolina Museum of Art; seminars and short courses for people engaged in a variety of creative media; and symposia in partnership with museums and other cultural and academic institutions, such as the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park.
The foundation also conducts a unique treatment and research program, coordinated by research director Donald Baucom and psychoanalytic consultant Alan Stern. It is the first and only longitudinal study of the lives and complete psychoanalytic treatment of creative individuals.
Currently providing treatment grants to a group of writers who are undergoing psychoanalysis, the foundation plans in the future to offer similar grants to individuals from other creative disciplines. A group of visual artists will be selected for the next segment of the research beginning in 2003.
For details about the foundation and its programs, please visit or call 919-677-9888, ext. 120.