Book, Architecture and Psyche: Psychoanalytic Study of How Buildings impact[LS]

It is not difficult to perceive 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 well-being (or badly) to be psychic. The built space, when understood as something that reflects 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 astute and profound argumentation that Lucy Huskinson develops in this essay, bringing a rather broad view of the phenomenon, from the great contemporary psychoanalysts and architects, elaborating a forceful critique of architectural practice while elaborating a lucid parallel between the body and the space of human habitation, mediated by psychoanalysis.. BACK COVER Buildings shape our identity and our way of feeling and perceiving ourselves in a profound way, not always evident to architects and urban planners, who design and conceive the spaces for living, or even to those who think they are intimately familiar with the buildings they frequent. Architecture and Psyche provides a theoretical guide to our unconscious behavior in relation to buildings and explains how and why we are attracted to specific elements and characteristics of architectural design. The work reveals how even the least inspiring 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 the fundamental needs of people.. Among other reasons, because our responses to architecture are often difficult to measure and are, in large part, unconscious. Lucy Huskinson frees psychoanalytic thought from its concerns with interpersonal relationships to address the vital connections we establish with the built environment, by linking it with architectural theory, thus giving news of a more comprehensive and useful psychoanalytic theory of relationship and identity.. COLLECTION STUDIES The Studies collection proposes to publish critical essays and research treated in depth, with solid theoretical argumentation in the most varied fields of knowledge. The Coleção Forma, together with Debates, forms the identifying mark of the publisher in our market. FROM THE COVER Cover image: C.R.. 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 of Rome.