Locating the couch:
an autobiographical analysis of the multiple spatialities of psychoanalytic therapy
Alberto Vanolo
Draft; final version published in Social & Cultural Geography (2014) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.882973
Abstract
Using an autobiographical methodology, the paper examines the different spatialities involved in psychoanalytic therapy. The paper proposes an understanding of space that is simultaneously physical, relational, emotional, symbolic and transformative. Focusing on the practices and microgeographies involved in psychoanalytic therapy, the aim of the paper is to contribute to the body of literature dealing with psychoanalytic geography by discussing how spatial logics pervade psychoanalytic treatment and to test autobiography as an experience-near, subjectively immersed instrument for investigation.
Key words
psychoanalytic geography, psychoanalytic therapy, psychoanalysis,autobiography, personal diary, transformative space.
Introduction
The aim of this paper is to provide a geographical analysis of the spatialities of psychoanalysis and, in particular, of the room where psychoanalytic therapy occurs. Because space is multidimensional, more-than-physical and more-than-cognitive, much can be said about the possible spatial fields and meanings at play in the psychoanalytic setting. In this paper, I will map the multiple spatialities surrounding my personal experience with psychoanalysis in a way which may hopefully contribute to existing literature on psychoanalytic geographies and therapeutic landscapes. In particular, I introduce the notion of transformative space, and assuming a dynamic and relational conception of space (specifically the one proposed by Massey 2005), I argue that psychoanalytic therapy is deeply spatial.
The analysis is based on an autobiographical methodology using my experience of Freudian psychoanalytic therapy as empirical material. Furthermore, the paper illustrates the effort required to work on a very personal assemblage of geographical ideas, emotional disorders and empirical facts, both at cognitive and emotional levels (if it is somehow possible to distinguish between the two). In fact, I experienced a difficult period in my life and had problems performing my duties as a geography researcher. Assuming that there is no boundary which dichotomously separates the personal and the intimate from the production of scientific knowledge, in this paper, I explicitly try to face and elaborate, here and now, the positions which as a geographer I developed through contact with psychotherapy.
In order to develop its arguments, the paper is organized as follows. The next section introduces therapeutic landscapes and psychoanalytic geography. It is worth noting that this paper chiefly approaches psychoanalytic geography as an object of research and not as a methodology; in other words, there will not be any direct attempt to use psychoanalytic ideas as a theoretical framework. Methodologically, the paper will rely mostly on autobiographical concepts, as outlined in Section 3, while Section 4 develops an analysis of my ongoing personal experience with psychotherapy as well as introduces the idea of transformative space. Finally, in the conclusions (Section 5), I discuss the notion of transformative space as a useful way to conceptualize the psychotherapeutic setting and as a way of considering the researcher’s porosity in the research process.
Therapeutic landscapes and psychoanalysis in geography (and vice versa)
The autobiographical analysis proposed in the paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of a specific therapeutic landscape, i.e. the room where psychoanalysis is performed. The term therapeutic landscape was originally introduced by Wil Gesler who defined it ‘as a geographic metaphor for aiding in the understanding of how the healing process works itself out in places (or situations, locales, settings, milieus)’ (Gesler 1992, p. 743). The literature on therapeutic landscapes includes analyses of the natural, built, social and symbolic dimensions of a wide range of places, exploring how they contribute to healing and well-being (Williams 2010). Studies include examinations of physical places which some people associate with health and well-being, such as wilderness environments (Bell 1999; Palka 1999), monasteries (Conradson 2007) and yoga centres (Hoyez 2007); the analysis of healthcare sites such as hospitals (Evans, Crooks and Kingsbury 2009) and the influence of meaningful fictional places on people’s perception and understanding of illness and health, such as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain(Gesler 2000).
The analysis proposed in this article concerns the spatialities of the psychoanalytic room. Psychoanalysis is a scientific field originally outlined by Sigmund Freud in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and later elaborated by several scholars who founded separate schools, including Adler, Jung, Lacan and many others. It is beyond the scope of this article to closely review the various psychoanalytical approaches or to propose a summary of their main concepts and ideas. But key Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, drive, libido, repression and transference are both popular and wellknown (and ‘bastardized’, according to Philo and Parr 2003, p. 286) in contemporary Western culture.
In essence, there are two ways in which the geographical literature has approached psychoanalysis. First, several authors have employed psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives in their geographical investigations. In these cases, psychoanalysis has essentially been used as a methodological or theoretical perspective (for a review of early literature, see Kingsbury 2004, 2009). Psychoanalytical approaches gained ground in geography in a nonlinear way as part of a conversation characterized by contributions, silences, internal divisions and discontinuities[1]. As stressed by Gould (1978) and Philo and Parr (2003), some geographers considered psychoanalysis to be overly ‘individualistic’. Put differently, psychoanalysis was seen as being confined to the analysis of individual psyches, thereby overlooking collective human action and the development of political perspectives. Moreover, according to Philo and Parr (2003), many geographers felt uncomfortable dealing with the unconscious as raw material for geographical inquiry. This discomfort was particularly evident amongst those whose work assumed humans to be conscious, self-aware and apparently self-directing beings who make rational decisions on the basis of available information.
These assumptions of human rationality and awareness were increasingly challenged in geography from the mid-1980s onwards, in particular due to the work of Steven Pile. In an article published in 1991 Pile stressed the potential of psychoanalytic frameworks to develop geographical analysis and overcome the limits of traditional conceptualizations of behavioural geography. According to Pile, psychoanalytic thought made it possible to link the individual and society and the expression of psycho-social experiences at different geographical scales (Philo and Parr 2003; Pile 1991,1996; Sibley 1995). Assumptions of human rationality have also been challenged by feminist geographers who, particularly during the 1990s, embraced psychoanalytic perspectives in order to criticize the vision of individuals as autonomous, bounded, intentional agents and in order to challenge the binary structure of much geographical thinking (linking for example masculinity to rationality, mind and objectivity and femininity to emotionality, the body and subjectivity; see, e.g. Bondi 1999; Nast 2000; Robinson 2000; Rose 1996).
A special issue of Social & Cultural Geography in 2003 (Bingley 2003; Bondi 2003; Callard 2003; Kingsbury 2003; Oliver 2003; Philo and Parr 2003; Sibley 2003; Wilton 2003) contributed profoundly to widening the theoretical and methodological debate regarding the interaction between psychoanalysis and geography. Also, in 2010, a special issue of The Professional Geographers discussed the use of psychoanalytic methodologies in geography (Healy 2010; Kingsbury 2010; Pile 2010a; Proudfoot 2010; Thomas 2010). Psychoanalytic perspectives have also been explicitly and repeatedly invoked in the field of emotional geographies. In close connection to geographical debates in humanistic, feminist and non-representational geography, emotional geography has engaged with psychoanalytic perspectives by focusing on the role of emotions within complex sets of unfolding intersubjective relations and representations. Moreover, emotional geography has developed interpretative frameworks which approach emotions as a relational, connective medium in which both researchers and researched subjects are deeply embedded (Bondi 2005; see also Curti, Aitken, Bosco and Goerisch 2011; Davidson, Bondi and Smith 2005; Pile 2010b; Smith, Davidson, Cameron and Bondi 2009; Thrift 2008). In this sense, and according to Bondi (2005),
psychotherapy offers important insights for geographers interested in developing relational approaches to emotions (see also Bennett 2009).
The second way in which geographers have approached psychoanalysis is to consider psychoanalytic practices as objects of research. In the field of historic geography, Elizabeth Gagen and Denis Linehan convened a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, bringing together several analyses of the historical geographies of psychoanalysis (see Gagen and Linehan 2006). In addition, a recent issue of Qualitative Inquiry on Research and Therapy explores connections between research practices and psychoanalytic knowledge (concerning geographical perspectives, see Bondi 2013; Tamas and Wyatt 2013; Wyatt and Tamas 2013).
A limited number of analyses have focused on the geographies of psychotherapeutic provision and the relation between the intellectual discipline of geography and therapy. A key author here is Liz Bondi, who has developed autobiographical perspectives on various styles of therapy (Bondi 1999, 2009, 2013; see also Oliver 2003). Several perspectives in her work with Judith Fewell are shared by the analysis proposed in this paper; Bondi and Fewell (2003) explore the spatialities of counselling practices and discuss how the spatiality of care associated with counselling involves understanding space as simultaneously real, imagined, material and symbolic. This work emphasizes the crucial importance of the discourse on spatial settings in psychotherapy and within the psychoanalytic discipline. In particular, Bondi (2009) discusses how different forms of psychotherapy are often rigorous about particular spatial configurations of bodies, furniture, doors and windows.
Finally, if geography has been exposed to psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis also makes ample use of spatial referents, spatial concepts and spatial metaphors (Pile 2005). In particular, Freud’s cornerstone text The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) proposes a ‘topographic’ theory of the mind, dividing mental processes into the conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious. As noted by Pile (1996), psychoanalytic insistence on the persistence of space in, through, beyond and between the material and the psychic spheres makes psychoanalysis a form of ‘spatial’ discipline (see Kingsbury 2003, 2004). For example, is it not unusual to imagine the psychoanalytic process as a practice of ‘going down’, ‘in depth’ in order to get in touch with one’s deepest feelings.
Methodological remarks: questioning autobiography
This paper is based on an autobiographical analysis of my personal experience of psychoanalytic treatment, which I underwent twice a week for a period of more than 6 years. The main empirical material is represented by my personal diary (cf. Alaszewski 2006). Given the ease and passion with which I write, during treatment, I produced a large number of diary entries, i.e. chronologically sorted texts describing facts of my life, personal reflections, dreams and other events. I should point out that the notes were written for my own benefit; I was driven by the desire to write in order to reflect on my life, without thinking about analysing the material at a later point or writing an article. For this reason, the diary entries were not systematic; for example, there is no description of each psychoanalytic session or a precise account of my activities on a daily basis. The notes were written on my portable computer and vary significantly in terms of length and style: some are just few lines, while others are many pages long; most of them are written as first-person descriptions of events and feelings, but several take the form of imaginary
letters to various people, including the psychoanalyst. For the purposes of this paper, I identified a total of forty-five texts that directly address my psychoanalytical experience by referring, for example, to my relationship with the psychoanalyst, the psychoanalytic room or my dreams involving the psychoanalytic space.
The forty-five texts have then been analysed. From a practical point of view, I first encoded the forty-five texts by identifying keywords. While reading the diary, many personal memories, emotions and Freudian ‘free associations’ emerged. I have chosen to consider these thoughts as empirical material by writing them down in a notebook. Then, I catalogued the texts into patterns (the diary entries and notes which emerged while reading) in order to build up the main storyline of the analysis (cf. Boyatzis 1998). If on the one hand, the obvious limit of this methodology is solipsism and the risk of romanticizing the self (Coffey 2004), on the other, it is possible to argue that this methodology offered me an experience-near and subjectively immersed approach. A close examination of my personal narratives arguably allows me to access situated knowledge, perception and emotions (cf. Banks 2003; Mercer 2007;Moss 2001; Purcell 2009). Also, the use of a diary provided me with a longitudinal view (Meth 2003; Morrison 2012). I was able to consider ‘variations of the self’ including how my experience of the psychoanalytic space varied over time. Such observations challenged the idea that the self is fully stable, defined and knowable, as it highlighted to the shifting—and frequently irrational—positionalities of the narrator-researcher. Second, I should emphasize that the use of autobiographical analysis allowed me to analyse a very private space. Psychoanalysis is largely based on private practices: therapies take shape in the intimacy of closed rooms where external sensorial stimuli, such as noises, are kept to a minimum (cf. Bondi and Fewell 2003). At the same time, as shall be discussed, the psychotherapeutic process should not be considered as individualistic. First, the process is based on the contingent encounter between the analysand and the psychoanalyst. Second, the purpose of psychoanalytic treatment takes different meanings from the perspectives of the patient and the psychotherapist, incessantly evolving over time. In my case, I initially expected therapy to make me ‘feel better’, but with time and following discussions with the psychoanalyst, I also started to look for the development of new and alternative relational understandings of thoughts, wishes, drives, fears, etc. Psychoanalysis is therefore performed in a framework of contingency, relations, movements and hence space and is thus able to be investigated using geographical and spatial perspectives.
A personal account of the imaginative spatialities of the psychoanalytic room A brief outline of my psychoanalysis and professional position
I am a male Italian geographer aged 37 who started psychoanalysis in 2006. In 2005, I experienced depression and, encouraged by close friends, I sought help through psychotherapy (without any expectations or particular knowledge of the subject). My problem with depression was limited and addressed in a relatively short time; however, during therapy, the unexpected illness and death of a young relative introduced different discourses, contents and expectations into the work. Psychoanalysis has been important insofar as it has helped me not only to understand and alleviate my personal pain, but also to build useful relations with people close to me, such as my family. Still, I am currently resisting contact with other people. This brings with it a sense of isolation and disconnection, and I do not feel at ease when I am away from home. I am currently finding it very difficult to get in touch with my former interests and passions including my profession. The sense of disconnection which pervades me at work can be more or
less described as a sense of uselessness, inappropriateness and inconsistent actions. This condition makes me feel guilty and undermines my confidence: I am fully aware of my privileged position in society, in terms of wealth, status and working conditions, but this makes me feel ‘guilty’ rather than ‘lucky’. To stop this sense of alienation, I feel an intense desire to fill my work with positive emotions as in the past. At the moment, I am trying to overcome this sensation by continuing psychoanalytic therapy. On a more subtle level, the personal experience behind this paper may be considered as an attempt to reconnect with geography through introspection.
The psychoanalytic therapy I experienced, and am still experiencing, requires two people, the patient (analysand) and the psychotherapist (psychoanalyst) to meet in a private room free from external impingements. I lie on a couch, while the psychotherapist sits outside my line of vision. This spatial configuration is based on the idea that reducing visual communication helps the analysand engage in subjective experiences without continuously trying to decode the psychoanalyst’s non-verbal forms of communication. As mentioned earlier, in my experience, the talking process allows the psychoanalyst and the analysand to seek to ‘map’, ‘explore’ and modify unconscious thoughts, desires and wishes and to alleviate pain, suffering and other symptoms.
Six psychoanalytic therapeutic spaces
In this autobiographical analysis, I focus on the spaces produced between the psychoanalyst and the analysand during psychotherapeutic treatment. I assume a dynamic and relational concept of space. In line with recent debates about the nature of geographical space, I will not consider space to be a fixed, definable and fully knowable entity, but rather as a reality always in the process of becoming (see particularly Jones 2009; Massey 2005). The analysis therefore focuses on practices and performances: space is assumed to be brought into being through performativity, i.e. through the unfolding actions of people (Rose 1999). This performative perspective views the production of space as contingent, paradoxical and contradictory. I will work with three intertwined propositions on space as elaborated by Massey (2005): 1. space is the product of interrelations; put differently, space is constituted through interactions;
2. space is the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist: it is the heterogeneous sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity;
3. space is always under construction, and it is always in the process of being made.
In what follows, I consider the material, discursive, emotional and symbolic practices which emerge from my autobiographical analysis in order to examine the multiple and porous spatial layers in which psychoanalytical relations develop. I organize the discussion around six forms of spatiality: these should not be considered conceptually separate, but rather as interrelated dimensions of the psychotherapeutic space.
The psychoanalytic room as a physical space
The first spatiality which emerges from the diary materials is the material space experienced in the banal act of arriving at and meeting inside the psychoanalytic room. More precisely, the roughly 18 m2 room is materially located in a studio in the centre of Turin, Italy. The studio includes a bathroom and a waiting room so that people leaving and arriving do not normally meet each other. The studio also includes a mysterious door, but I have no idea where it leads to. A rough schematization of the studio is presented in Figure 1.
Both the waiting room and main room are elegant, comfortable and similar to what I imagine is the stereotype of the Freudian psychoanalytic room. They include lots of Freud’s books, leather couches, carpets, soft lights and no personal images of the therapist. The male Freudian psychoanalyst, about 50 years old, always sits on a chair just behind the couch where I lie down.
Figure 1 – The psychoanalytic studio: my mental map
Emotional spaces
The space of the psychoanalytic room is strongly connected to intense emotional practices and experiences. In my experience, psychoanalytic practices produce particular kinds of emotional space:
When I think of the room I feel a sensation of comfort and intimacy. (Diary excerpt, May 2012).
In other words, encountering the room (going to the room, thinking of it, dreaming of it) produces a whole set of different, contrasting and evolving emotions. Many authors who have dealt with the relationship between emotions and space (see Anderson 2006; Duff 2010) have emphasized that emotions are not solely ‘things inside me’. On the contrary, emotions are relational and produced by contingency; they often come from somewhere outside the body, from the settings, contexts and places where relations occur (see Pile 2010b). In this sense, emotions are neither ‘possessed’ nor ‘passed’. Over the years, my contact with
the psychoanalytic room has produced a wide range of alternative and contradictory emotions, from hostility and repulsion during certain periods (‘I don’t really want to go there’—Diary excerpt, December 2006) to attraction and expectation (‘I think I’ll discuss this event next Friday’—Diary excerpt, November 2007). At present, as mentioned earlier, intimacy is the main sensation pervading my contact with the room. I do not associate intimacy with ‘secrecy’ as, in time, ‘I opened my room to the outside’ (Diary excerpt, December 2009), a metaphor I use in order to describe my growing confidence in openly talking to other people about my psychotherapy without shame. For me, intimacy involves a feeling of attraction, comfort and ease. As an example of the attraction towards the space of the room, I can mention my fascination with the image of the studio as seen from the outside.
Sometimes I find myself walking in front of the studio as I stroll along, with no specific reason connected to psychoanalysis. It makes me think of silly questions such as ‘is it empty?’, ‘when does cleaning takes place?’ (Diary excerpt, December 2009).
The above text testifies to an interest in the persistence of place. The issue of persistence emerges strongly while I read the diary entries; in fact, images emerge involving
leaving the studio during different seasons and different years, from hot summer days to the snowy winter, from times past when I used to run to the kindergarten immediately after psychoanalysis, when my son was younger, to, more recently, when I went to therapy immediately after lecturing. This reminds me of the famous collection of photographs of Auggie’s tobacco shop. [Note: in Wayne Wang’s 1995 movie Smoke; in the movie for 14 years every day Auggie takes a picture from the street corner outside his store. In Auggie’s words, the photographs ‘(...) are all the same. But each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings and your dark mornings’]. (note written while reading the diary, December 2012).
I associate the idea of persistence to something meaningful and stable, something I could care for, like an old friend in a photo. Because spaces and places are precarious achievements made up of relations between multiple entities (Massey2005), my perception of persistence is emotionally intense. I am aware that my psychoanalytic relationship will necessarily change with time, producing alternative and evolving emotional configurations.
Relational spaces
The room is the place where I meet the psychotherapist. Focusing on the spatiality of the relation and ‘thinking space relationally’ (Jones 2009; Massey 2005), the psychoanalytic room may be conceptualized as a process, a mutual and progressive construction where bodies and objects meet and touch. Of course, the bodies involved are not only human, but assemblages of any kind including discourses, ideas, emotions, objects and the highly symbolic couch (cf. Deleuze 1988; see also Lim 2007). In addition, contact in the psychoanalytic relational space takes shape beyond the visual and challenges dualistic understandings of agency and passivity: in the psychoanalytic relation, behaviours conventionally interpreted as signs of passivity, as silence or resistance to contact with the psychoanalyst, are considered as active manifestations of the self and hence meaningful acts of agency. For example, I remember many relationally and emotionally intense moments marked by absolute silence. Psychoanalytic contact is an intimate border zone, a place to express and experience emotions and a space which widens and refines what a body is allowed to do (cf. Pratt and Rosner 2006). For example, in my relation with the psychoanalyst, I feel allowed
to do things which I currently do not feel comfortable doing elsewhere such as crying or discussing my sadness and lack of interest in the Other.
I’ve never talked about that my whole life. I have to say that talking never made me feel better; on the contrary, I felt really bad, and I think he [the analyst] noticed that. (Diary excerpt, March 2007)
Moreover, this quote shows I am aware that I am now able to do things that I did not feel comfortable doing in the past, such as talking (and writing) about my emotions and building more spontaneous relations. One key element in most contemporary psychoanalytical schools is that psychoanalytic performance is not strictly bound to the intimate room where the relation is performed (cf. Botticelli 2004). The relation between the psychoanalyst and the analysand, its effects, the assimilation of alternative ideas and perspectives and, in general, modifications of the self, spill over to the outside, into daily life and daily relations. In my case, I think that the development of a relation with the psychoanalyst—a specific relation based on a number of peculiarities, including for example protection of confidentiality—allowed me to experience the existence of ‘multiplicity’ (in Massey’s sense), in this case, to experience an alternative human relation. In this relationship, I expressed myself in a way which was free from my narcissistic drives and desires for condescendence; I feel that in time, this experience has in part pervaded my human relationships outside the psychoanalytic room. This involves and concerns my research practices. For example, I gradually moved from apparently ‘emotionally neutral’ objects of research, mainly related to industrial geography, towards more ‘emotionally involved’ fields of research, including political geography, geography of sexuality and, in this latter case, psychotherapy[2]. Furthermore, I have abandoned some mainstream approaches and topics which in the past I probably chose, not because I was interested in them, but out of a desire to be accepted by my colleagues.
Imagined space
My changed attitude towards academic research proves to me that I am not a stable researching-entity, but instead a porous construction shaped through contact with other bodies, experiences and spaces. Echoing Sack (1997) and Casey (2001), it can be argued that the self and space are co-constituted as each is essential to the being of the other. Because I assume that space is always in the process of becoming, it may be argued that the self is also always in process. What is crucial in this account is how contact and the predisposition towards contact may augment and enrich the self/space relation, adding new layers of possible development.
To develop this latter argument, it is useful to think of a further conceptualization of the room, which echoing Andrews (2004), I call ‘imagined space’. By imagined space, I mean a mental representation of the therapeutic setting as a sort of ‘therapeutic landscape of the mind’ (Gastaldo, Andrews and Khanlou 2004). Without being physically present in the room, these imaginations can affect the expression and relations inherent to the self. In my own experience, for instance, I sometimes imagine the psychoanalytic room when I am not in it. In particular, I used to imagine I was narrating ongoing events and emotions, i.e. translating them into the language of words and discourses as if I had to discuss events and emotions with the psychoanalyst; sometimes, I even imagined probable reactions from the psychoanalyst.
I will tell [the analyst] about (...), and I am sure he will ask me to think about my emotions (...). I will explain to him that I feel sad and maybe guilty, even if there is no logical reason for feeling this way, and I am pretty sure he will remain silent, at first, but then he’ll invite me to imagine alternative versions of the whole issue, including the possibility that maybe there are some ‘real’ reasons for feeling guilty. (Diary excerpt, November 2009).
From a psychoanalytic point of view, this phenomenon of reframing, which I call narrativization, probably has a lot to do with transference because it involves the mobilization and redirection, in my daily life, of the desire to share my daily experiences with the psychoanalyst or simply to be in the psychotherapeutic room. However, the question can also be tackled from a socio-geographical point of view by reflecting on the role and position of the psychoanalytic room in my daily social life experience. In other words, to what degree does the relational experience of psychoanalysis leak into my other everyday spaces and potentially influence them?
As an example, I can mention that thinking about how much the psychoanalytic room is ‘near’ or ‘far’ from my office means, for me, thinking about the mutual co-constitution of emotions, space and contact with the psychoanalytic field. It is important to mention that the process of narrativization is, for me, rather similar to the process of writing a paper: during my fieldwork, I sometimes imagine writing about what I am looking at. Of course, it is impossible to say whether or not this attitude has been influenced by psychoanalytic therapy; I think it is possible there has been a sort of convergence and mutual influence.
Disciplinary space
The practices which are part of the psychoanalytic treatment are far from spontaneous because they are regulated by a number of explicit and implicit rules. By choosing to undergo psychoanalytic treatment (as, arguably, any kind of treatment), I am aware that I am submitting myself to a strict discipline. Many practical rules were explicitly set in my first meeting with the psychoanalyst, including, for example, that meetings are held at specific times in a specific place (the room) and that the psychoanalyst has to be paid at the end of each month. Most of the rules are, however, not explicit: I have never discussed them with the psychoanalyst, but these rules contribute to defining the boundaries of my psychoanalytic treatment. For example, it is an implicit rule that contact between the therapist and the analysand is restricted to meetings inside the room (or, in case of urgent messages, to telephone calls) and that I have to lie down on the couch. Of course, these are not universal rules for psychoanalytic treatments as different treatments and different therapists may surely propose or negotiate alternative settings and rules, and hence, the interaction between the patient and the therapist will produce diverse relational and disciplinary spaces. In my case, the disciplinary space has been reinforced by recurrent practices as well as by continually avoiding other practices. To quote two examples,
I really enjoyed reading David Foster Wallace. After reading the grotesque story about the ugly, selfish, depressed person and her relation with the psychoanalyst, I started thinking I’d be funny and ironic to give the book to [the analyst]. But is giving a present allowed and appropriate? I don’t think so, because it never happened in the past years, and because it is clear that our relation has to be somehow ‘professional’. (Diary excerpt, June 2010; note: the story is ‘The depressed person’, in D.F. Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous
I have never ever phoned the analyst to discuss an unexpected problem or event, and since I have never ever done it in all these years, I have become increasingly aware that calling would be out of place. But I wonder: if I really needed to call him, will I be free to do so? (Note: written while reading my diary, December 2012).
I also perceive that the disciplinary space defines the boundaries in which the actions of the therapist take place: for example, he has to be in the room at the time agreed with the analysand, has to maintain confidentiality, has to generally behave in a professional manner and listen carefully to what I am saying (cf. Bondi and Fewell 2003). What is specific to psychoanalytic treatment—and what differentiates it from many other practices requiring discipline—is the fact that the psychoanalytic space is supposed to be, according to my therapist, a ‘space of freedom’. As the psychoanalyst specifically told me: I have the freedom to speak about any subject whatsoever, to stay silent, to sleep, to cry, to do ‘whatever I want in these fifty minutes’. But I realize that the ‘whatever I want’ the psychoanalyst refers to has to be bound by the discussed set of rules: for example, I am pretty sure that ‘whatever I want’ never includes physical aggression against the psychoanalyst. This means it is a very bounded space of freedom which, to be honest, I have never perceived at all in terms of ‘freedom’. Of course, this does not mean that I am forced to submit myself to this disciplinary space, or that submission itself may not be useful to healing myself; on the contrary, it shows that the tension between discipline and freedom in the psychotherapeutic space is complex and ambiguous.
Dreams
One last practice with a spatial patterning is dreaming, as the psychoanalytic room occupies an important place in my dream space. Dreams are empirical materials rarely considered by geographers (with the remarkable exception of Pile 2005). Inspired by debates on the virtual (Shields 2003), I should emphasize that dreams are real experiences. In the first place, dreams are real because of the concrete presence of neurochemistry and the electrical exchanges between brain cells; second, dreams may be so powerful and vivid they can be mistaken for waking life experiences and may even inspire action. At the same time, dreams may be characterized by peculiar and mysterious spatial mechanisms:
in dreams, objects and people often appear to be ‘there’ and ‘here’ at the same time. Roads can lead to more than two places at once. Spaces can be logically unrelated but appear connected nonetheless. (Wachtel 1980, quoted in Shields 2003, p. 43).
Dreams are fundamental elements in psychoanalytic theory. Without going into the details of these theories, suffice it to say that psychoanalysis made Western popular culture aware of the fact that dreams have personal ‘meanings’ and, as suggested by the title of Freud’s famous book, dreams may be ‘interpreted’. Because I am undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, I clearly tend to focus on my dreaming and to think of dreams as ‘precious’ elements to reflect on. In my case, I happened to dream about the studio, alternative settings and imaginary dialogues with the psychoanalyst; I have often discussed these dreams with the psychoanalyst himself, arguably nurturing and reinforcing other dreams.
Tonight, I had a really strange dream. I was in the psychoanalytic room. In the dream I had to write a paper about external economies for Economic Geography, but in the dream I had nothing really new and meaningful to say about external economies. So I was discussing this problem with (...) [the psychoanalyst]. (Diary excerpt, March 2012).
It is beyond the scope of this paper to try and interpret the meaning of dreams about the psychoanalytic room. What can certainly be mapped is the mere presence in dream space: the simple fact that I dream of the room produces a dream space that may interfere with the other spatial layers discussed in the paper. This vision is in line with the debate on absence and presence in space (see Callon and Law 2004): considering a dream space as different and partly separate from ‘natural’ space, it is possible to emphasize the role of fluxes, circulation and the modes in which spaces and times deploy themselves. As an example, I can mention that dream space becomes an element of relational space the moment I start talking about my dreams with the analyst.
Psychoanalytic spaces at work: the production of transformative space
The six spaces outlined in the previous section—physical space, emotional space, relational space, imagined space, disciplinary space and dream space—are not interdependent: they are interconnected and overlapping layers of meaning or different spatial perspectives produced by psychoanalysis. My argument is that the structure and organization of these spatial layers is crucially important in psychoanalytic practices. As a personal example of the relevance of space in psychoanalytic therapy, I can mention that I met the psychoanalyst twice outside the psychoanalytic room, once in a restaurant and once in the street, and in both cases, I immediately felt uncomfortable. The feeling that something (our interaction) was ‘out of place’ (cf. Cresswell 1996) underlines the significance of spatiality for the generation and circulation of emotions and meanings. It also illustrates how the various psychoanalytic spatialities outlined here are interconnected. The disruption of the norms of psychoanalytic setting— meeting the analyst ‘outside’ the treatment room—frays some of the margins of the psychoanalytic space and underlines the importance of spatial dimensions in the psychotherapeutic process.
Second, the fact that the room, as discussed, pervades ‘other’ emotional and imaginative spaces in my life suggests that the psychoanalytic room is a mobile construct, a sort of cognitive and pre-cognitive device moving and hybridizing everyday actual and potential experiences. To put it differently, in my experience, psychoanalytic spaces leak into everyday spaces influencing, to different degrees, my relations more generally. Of course, to a certain extent, every experience and relation is more or less mobile in the sense outlined here; however, in the case of psychoanalytic therapy, mobility becomes potentially transformative: one of the goals of the psychoanalytic treatment is to permeate and modify the emotional surface of the analysand’s contacts with other bodies so as to produce more positive contacts with the world. In this sense, my hypothesis strongly echoes Pile’s assumption that psychoanalysis is a spatial discipline (Pile 1996). I use the expression ‘transformative space’ to illustrate the spatial pervasiveness of the psychoanalytic space, which penetrates and potentially modifies daily spaces and experiences. It should be noted that the idea of ‘space of transformation’ has already been used in social sciences and particularly in feminist geography: Robinson (2000), working on the contributions of Butler, Irigaray and Kristeva, analysed the links between spatial imagination and the politics of transformation. Here, my perspective is rather different because the focus is limited to my personal experiences and contacts without a well-defined political perspective or the desire for progressive and collective social transformations.
I can mention the following as a personal example of the transformative space of psychotherapy. In recent months, I experienced difficulty in getting dressed and leaving the house as I perceived these activities to be tiring, laborious and pointless.
It overwhelms me to think about the many things I’ll have to do tomorrow in order to get to the office: I will have to get up, have breakfast, wash, dress, get out, unlock my bicycle, greet people I know... I know staying at home is morbid, but getting out of the house seems to me too difficult. (Diary excerpt, November 2012).
Because I do not have to go to my Department regularly, I can work from home with my personal computer and carry out research from the private space of my home and with very limited contact with other people. The fact that the psychoanalytic setting ‘forced’ me to go the analyst’s studio twice a week helped me maintain contact with leaving the house, fight my attitude towards isolation and continue going to my workplace. You could say that other social practices (e.g. attending a gym) may produce a similar effect, and in this sense, I am convinced that psychoanalysis is not necessarily the best therapy for everyone. The point here is that the psychoanalytic disciplinary space—which has been, to some extent, ‘successful’ for me— does not operate separately from the other understandings of space discussed in this paper: I have been immersed in the disciplinary space because I have also been immersed in all the psychoanalytic spatialities described in the paper. In other words, although psychoanalysis is obviously not needed to be able to leave the house, even in a depressive state, I physically went out because I had to attend sessions, access its normative space and the desire to ‘touch’ emotional and relational spaces. In this sense, the room operated as a therapeutic landscape for me.
This example may also be conceptualized as a case of transformation of the self linked to the ability to develop emotional contact between the self and other bodies. Because feeling is not only or not entirely personal and individual, emotions emerge between similar bodies, human and trans-human (cf. Thrift 2008), for example between myself and external space. As discussed by Ahmed (2008), drawing on Spinoza, emotions shape ‘the very surfaces of bodies’; they take shape through repeated action over time and shape our orientations towards and away from others. Emotions shape what bodies can do, and the capacity of emotions to modify our attitudes and actions towards others may take the form of empowerment or disempowerment, freedom or constraint as it shapes our potential ways of being and acting. The positionality of the self is understood here as a relational concept, connected to particular place-specific settings which emerge, for example, through relations with other people and events, whether these are present here and now or located in the ‘there and then’ (Conradson 2003; Rose 1997). The transformative space of psychoanalysis is therefore contemporary relational, emotional, symbolic, actual and potential (and potentially ‘transformative’).
Conclusions: is there anybody out there?
The paper has provided an empirical mapping of six conceptually distinct and interrelated spaces of psychoanalytic therapies: physical, emotional, relational, imagined, disciplinary and dream spaces. The possibility to alleviate pain and modify contact with everyday experiences and relations through psychoanalysis—specifically through the construction of what has been called ‘transformative space’—and hence the mechanics of the room as a therapeutic landscape have been related to the possibility of mobilizing and transferring ideas developed on the couch between different relational, emotional, symbolical and imaginative spaces. In this sense, the theory proposed here is that psychoanalytic therapy is deeply spatial, and in particular, it implies the development of a ‘transformative space’. Echoing Massey (2005) and her relational conception of space, it has been argued that transformative space is inherently relational, open-ended and heterogeneous. Transformative spaces support the development of alternative
trajectories for the self, alternative contacts with the Other and alternative symbolizations and interpretations of individual and collective experiences.
Second, this analysis has explored an autobiographical methodology as a tool to investigate emotions in psychoanalytic therapy. In particular, through the mobilization of ideas about psychoanalytic therapy within my field of study, I have chosen an emotional contact with the research object; writing this paper has helped me reconnect with emotions. Of course, this is very personal, and hence the provocative title of this concluding section.
Finally, the reflections outlined in the paper may stimulate further lines of research on the micro-geographies of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as well as other forms of therapeutic practice. Spatial concepts and spatial perspectives pervade the psychoanalytic setting in several ways which have been merely touched on in this paper. Further investigations might therefore focus on the concepts of presence and absence in psychoanalytic therapy; the central and marginal position of emotions in the construction of the psychoanalytic therapeutic landscape; the power relations affecting psychoanalysis and their relation with emotions and the scalar connections between the couch and the global, for example by exploring the contribution of psychotherapy to the development of emotional relations with objects and subjects in different spaces and across different scales.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Annalisa Colombino, Elisa Bignante, Marco Santangelo, Ugo Rossi, the Editor and the anonymous Referees for their friendly support and Carlo Brosio for our therapeutic landscape.
Endnotes
1. It has to be mentioned that the diffusion of psychoanalytic ideas in geography has been characterized by notable absences: for example the lack of Jungian and post-Freudian perspectives (Callard 2003).
2. Industrial geography may certainly be investigated and discussed with passion and personal participation. My autobiographical story shows that I gradually moved towards more ‘emotionally involved’ and ‘emotionally exposed’ objects and research methods; this reveals a strong link between the professional and the emotional. Prior to my difficulty with social relations, I was interested chiefly in social and political phenomena which I investigated with ethnographic methods and qualitative research tools such as interviews. More recently, with my growing discomfort with social interactions, I shifted to non-human objects (e.g. videogame culture or analysis of policy documents); this was arguably a way to work around my difficulty with inter-personal relations. Of course, this article moves in the same direction.
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