Questioning the dualities of psychoanalysis and architecture: mediating our connection to the material world

While Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology may seek to go beyond the Cartesian split of body and mind, they draw their own lines of division, splitting the mind into two worlds of ego-conscious and unconscious, each with their own ways of Being and rules of behaviour. Furthermore, they tend to ignore the relevance of the material world for our psychological wellbeing, preferring to focus on interpersonal and intrapersonal human relationships. This essay examines the models of the unconscious put forward by Freud and Jung in relation to the material, non-human environment to reconsider the significance of the built environment for their theories. I conclude that Jung’s approach to the built environment is perhaps more defensive or closed-off to the “outside” world than he otherwise suggests in his writings, while Freud’s by contrast is potentially more open to it, and probably more than he himself realized or was willing to accept.