Book, Architecture and Psyche: psychoanalytic study of how buildings impact[LS]

It is not difficult to realize in ourselves how intensely we are impacted by the environments we frequent and visit. Much more difficult, however, is to understand such impacts at the level of our subjectivity and how much they can influence our psychological well-being (or ill-being). The built space, when understood as something that is reflected in our way of acting, feeling and thinking, is an important element of our constitution as individual and social subjects. Roughly speaking, this is the basis of the shrewd and profound argument that Lucy Huskinson develops in this essay, bringing a very broad view of the phenomenon, based on the great psychoanalysts and contemporary architects, elaborating a blunt critique of architectural practice while at the same time elaborating a parallel lucid relationship between the body and the human living space, mediated by psychoanalysis. FOURTH COVER Buildings shape our identity and our way of feeling and perceiving ourselves in profound ways, not always evident to architects and urban planners, who design and conceive living spaces, or even to those who think they are intimately familiar with the buildings they frequent. Architecture and the Psyche provides a theoretical guide to our unconscious behavior towards buildings and explains how and why we are attracted to specific elements and features of architectural design. The work reveals how even the most uninspiring of buildings can be modified to meet our unconscious expectations and requirements – and similarly explores the repercussions on our well-being when buildings fail to do so. The utilitarian principles of function, efficiency, cost and visual impact do not meet people's fundamental needs. Among other reasons, because our responses to architecture are often difficult to measure and are largely unconscious. Lucy Huskinson frees psychoanalytic thought from its concerns with interpersonal relationships to address the vital connections we make with the built environment by linking it with architectural theory, thus giving notice of a more comprehensive and useful psychoanalytic theory of relationships and identity. STUDIES COLLECTION The Studies collection aims to publish critical essays and research treated in depth, with solid theoretical arguments in the most varied fields of knowledge. The collection forms, together with Debates, the publisher's identification mark in our market. FROM THE COVER Cover image: CR Cockerell, The Professor's Dream, 1848. Royal Academy of Arts, London This painting, with its buildings from all over the world, superimposed on each other, recalls what Freud had in mind for his eternal city from Rome.