Rooms and Spaces
“Your house is your larger body. It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream? And dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?”
Psychoanalysis is dynamic, which includes times of silent reflectiveness and others of varying intense emotions. Because of this, psychoanalysts design their ‘houses’ carefully in order to facilitate these intra- and interpersonal dynamics. The psychoanalytic office will reflect the ‘person’ of the analyst – their individual philosophy, values, aesthetics, books and theories are all implicitly (and explicitly) evident. Even the most austere office makes a statement – literal ‘neutrality’ is neither attainable, nor desirable. For example, a very minimalistic office, whilst not ‘intrusive’, may make the therapist seem cold and uncaring. Another office, in the style of Freud’s for example, may be rich, intriguing and evocative for some - and ‘overwhelming’ for others. Regarding Freud’s office, the myriad artefacts and textures were thought to inspire trust, reverence, even a taste for exploration and adventure. Architectural design, and the atmospheres evoked by it, cannot be separated from what psychoanalysis is, and does.
“Architecture is aesthetic work in as much as rooms and space are always created with a specific quality of mood and hence as atmospheres. Buildings, interior rooms, squares, shopping centres, airports, and urban spaces such as cultural landscapes can be elevating, oppressive, light, cold, comfortable, solemn, and objective; they can radiate a repelling or an inviting, an authoritative, or a familiar atmosphere. The visitor and user, the customer and the patient are all touched or moved by these atmospheres. The architect, however, creates them, more or less consciously. The sensual items which he posits: the colours, the design of surfaces, the lines, the arrangements and the constellations are, at the same time a physiognomy from which the atmosphere emanates. This is a matter of course to every architect as an aesthetic and as a practical worker.”
At least in the privileged West, just as the architectural design of our private home reflects the values and aspirations of its occupants, the home for the psychoanalytic session is thoughtfully constructed and its atmosphere painstakingly considered. Apart from the literal sense, the therapy session has no obvious beginning. It is always ‘in mind’. Its practical beginning could be on the morning of the session, or at the lobby of the office building, or in the waiting room – or at the time of dropping onto the couch or chair. In another sense, therapy might be experienced as having no beginning or ending at all. Certainly, in most cases, the therapy starts long before the face-to-face greeting at the door.
The consulting room must have a holding capacity, like a three-dimensional, expanding ‘net’ or ‘web’, keeping the patient safe so that when they wonder, or wander, they don’t get lost. It encourages openness and flexibility, yet it remains ‘protective’. This ‘net’ must contain affects, without impinging. It must also be strong enough to hold firm in case of patients’ fragmentation, emotional implosion/explosion, or other psychic phenomena. This net might also carry a musical quality , given the music’s presence in the waiting space – like an aroma which both lulls and enlivens, possibly sparking engagement of some sort, at a reverberative distance.
Transitioning into the consulting room involves a number of steps, often completed without any conscious thought. These steps on the road to the session are not without meaning. As Schinaia writes, “the reception desk of a building, its hall, its stairs, its elevator, its ante-room, its waiting room, and also its toilets are examples of the spatial sequence we must cross from a public space to a private home. As one enters the building’s precinct and proceeds towards the analytic room, layers of space are penetrated slowly, at walking pace, preparing for the inner sanctum, while insulating the analysand and the analyst from the outside world”.
The art critic Gillo Dorfles (in Schiniaia, 2018) focuses on the concept of diastema, which he defines as “a gap between two events, two objects, or two musical keys”. If the journey of transition from the outer world to the inner sanctum is viewed as points on a continuum, the two points that would possess greatest energy would be the point of entrance into the waiting room from outside, and the point of entrance into the consulting room from the waiting room.
Perspectives from the couch and chair of the ‘inner sanctum’ of psychoanalysis are imagined in the photographs above. The psychoanalytic session, including the journey to and from home, has a musical rhythm and a calling, textural melody. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ are experienced dynamically. There is harmony in the surroundings and timbral qualities of the sounds as the eyes shift around, or close up as the dark, low notes settle. Once inside the therapy room, the aperture of mind and memory adjust focus as perceptions are directed by modulations of feeling.
“What we want is to facilitate a ‘benign regression’ (psychoanalyst Michael Balint’s term) – by creating a sense of safety then people may be able to go much deeper into psychotic, very disturbing, fragmented states of being – to allow them to go to ‘notsafe’, unexplored, ‘unlived’ parts of themselves.”
Music as Atmosphere
R. Murray Schafer 1974
Böhme has described how music itself can be conceptualised as an ubiquitous element of the environment. As he puts it, (music) “has its own purpose: the awareness, the preservation, and the shaping of acoustic space… Music is an art of space, just like architecture”. Böhme refers to R. Murray Schafer’s “World Soundscape Project” in the 1970s and how the acoustic life of buildings, urban environments, even towns, as well as the sounds of the sea, the forest and other landscapes can be documented and used as features in musical compositions, revealing the “musicality of the world itself” .
“The aesthetics of atmospheres can provide the simple answer that music as such is the transformation of physically sensed space. Music shapes the way the listener finds him– or herself in space, it intervenes directly in his or her physical economy. Practitioners have made use of this long before any theoretical realisation: already with silent movies, music served to lend the image three-dimensionality as well as emotional depth. Film music later followed this practice. With regards to radio plays or radio features people actually refer to an “atmos” serving as background to the narrative: music or, more generally, acoustic action to provide the spoken words with atmosphere. Similarly, in bars, an atmosphere is created through a specific sound, and Muzak® is used to make it pleasant to be at airports, in subway stations, or at the dentist’s, or to brighten and enliven one’s presence in department stores or hotel lobbies.
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Although the emotional tenor of the session is highly dynamic, the setting in which it occurs needs to remain fairly neutral (but not blandly or self-consciously neutral). Similar to Uµ, the setting itself is an unsaturated, benign space which leaves space for patients’ affect to emerge freely and without constraint or distraction.
Although many analysts have written about the ‘musicality’ of the psychoanalytic interaction, there has been little psychoanalytic research on the facilitative atmosphere music (Uµ) provides as the patient moves into and through the waiting room on their way to the session proper.
Styles of consulting rooms
“The dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease”
Early Freudian consulting room, in the ‘abundant’ style
“The analytic room should have the capacity to evoke different kinds of associations and be able to accommodate richly variegated desires of the occupants. The effect of the architecture on the analytic relationship, and hence the analysis, in direct and indirect awareness, is profound.”
Contemporary analyst’s consulting room, in the ‘austere’ style
“I must say that only very rarely have I discovered in offices the characteristics of the indecipherable and Spartan neutrality that were recommended until a few decades ago as a guarantee of the “blank slate”. Today’s analysts – in their exterior settings as well – seem to have in part renounced the pretext of an ideal undetectability of the analyst’s self in the professional relationship. If anything, judging by the distinctive language of their office furnishings, they appear inclined to officially admit to their existence as individuals, in addition to their identities as those who merely fulfil a function.”
Basile (2009) refers to studies where analysts often have objects (paintings, masks etc) in their rooms that allow mediation between their feelings and those of their patients. As Bolognini (2008) states, it is necessary for analysts to maintain “their good sense and good taste in limiting themselves to a perceptible but usually sober personalisation of the environment, avoiding a narcissistic invasion of the working field with the exhibition of their private iconography”.
Waiting-room music is not just an ‘unsaturated’ decoration, but rather a possible therapeutic asset. Uµ tends to blend into the background, whilst still reflecting a ‘human temperature’. There needs to be energy enough to subtly ‘warm’ the space without ‘suffocating’ the occupants.
The same goes for office design – too much saturation can overwhelm the occupants and demand a certain attention – and too little can create a feeling of coldness and psychological distance which may inhibit the development of trust.