Using Architecture to Think Ourselves into Being: Buildings as Storehouses of Unconscious Thought

Lucy Huskinson.

‘Using Architecture to Think Ourselves into Being: Buildings as Storehouses of Unconscious Thought’, Chapter 5 in Analytical Psychology and the Human Sciences, Routledge FreeBook, pp.102-140. Also Chapter 5 in Architecture and the Mimetic Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of How Buildings Make and Break Our Lives, Routledge: London and New York, pp. 134 – 172.


Abstract.

Buildings design and shape us as much as we design and shape them. They shape our identity and sense of self in profound ways that are not always evident to architects or to those who think they are intimately familiar with the buildings they inhabit. Criteria for effective architectural design have been grounded in utilitarian and aesthetic principles, which although important, often fail to meet the existential needs of those who inhabit and use buildings. Misconceptions are rife, not least because our responses to architecture difficult to measure and are largely unconscious.

This chapter is taken from a theoretical guide to our unconscious behavior in relation to buildings, which explains both how and why we are drawn to specific elements and features of architectural design. It reveals how even the most uninspiring of buildings can be modified to meet our unconscious expectations and requirements of them. By the same token, it explores the repercussions for our well-being when buildings fail to do so. By bridging psychoanalytic thought and architectural theory, this book frees the former from its preoccupations with interpersonal human relations to address the vital relationships we established with our nonhuman environments.

Chapter 5 in the book investigates how our experience of buildings can evoke traces of memories and inspire creative thoughts. It draws upon theories from cognitive psychology about the formulation of our creative thoughts and Freud’s established method of the ‘dream-work’ to explain how architecture can facilitate thoughts, ideas, and experiences that have otherwise been inaccessible to us, made unconscious and repressed. By way of illustration and case study, the chapter analyses a personal account of Freud’s that describes a trip he took to the Acropolis in Athens to demonstrate how his perceptions of its architecture led him to discover insights about himself that couldn’t have been thought through by more direct and logical means.