The Body and the City

Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity

Steve Pile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415066495
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135082611
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last century, psychoanalysis has transformed the ways in which we think about our relationships with others. Psychoanalytic concepts and methods, such as the unconscious and dream analysis, have greatly impacted on social, cultural and political theory. Reinterpreting the ways in which Geography has explored people's mental maps and their deepest feelings about places, The Body and the City outlines a new cartography of the subject.
The author maps key coordinates of meaning, identity and power across the sites of body and city. Exploring a wide range of critical thinking, particularly the work of Lefebvre, Freud and Lacan, he analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external world to present a pathbreaking psychoanalysis of space.

INTRODUCTION

The unknown spaces of the mind

BANNER HEADLINE, DAILY MAIL, 22 SEPTEMBER 1995

Euro Court’S Gipsy Shock

It looks like the Daily Mail has been hit by lightning today. First paragraph:

A SHOCK European ruling threatens to throw Britain’s planning laws into chaos

(front page).

Is this a familiar Euroscare along the lines of ‘they’ want to ban ‘our’ sausages or Babycham or the like? It is a good front page for a patriotic (and xenophobic) tabloid like the Daily Mail: hundreds of thousands of middle Englanders are quaking in their boots at the thought of what might follow. There is a threat to the state and good order from a familiar menace: the European Court of Human Rights. Worse, for them, is to follow. Next paragraph, the Mail has a prophecy: ‘It could mean gipsies being allowed to park their caravans virtually anywhere they choose, even in rural beauty spots where houses would never be allowed.’

On page 2, the newspaper of the year ‘exposes’ the issues. The case was brought to the Court by Mrs June Buckley after she was refused planning permission by her local council. The Daily Mail decides to side with ‘the public interest’, rather than the ‘slight’ right of Mrs Buckley to her lifestyle. To support its case, the Mail turns to Kathleen Crandall, South Cambridge-shire council’s legal and housing director, to find out what she thinks. She finds caravans ‘intrusive’ and they ‘deface’ the landscape. She warns, ‘if this [judgement] goes against us, it would mean everywhere is affected’.

Back to the front page. Apparently, it’s an “alarming prospect’ and, allegedly, it has ‘provoked fury’ amongst (unnamed) Tory MPs. The Daily Mail alleges that the ruling by the Court of Human Rights states that ‘laws requiring planning permission violate gipsy rights to “a traditional lifestyle”’. Although nothing has been finalised, this decision is a ‘bombshell’ which has led to calls from many (undisclosed) quarters to ‘pull out’ of the European Court. Sir Ivan Lawrence, QC, is quoted as saying that this is one more example of ‘interference in our sovereign democratic nation’. It gets worse. Five column inches into the ‘shocking’ front page story: ‘Furious Whitehall officials fear the case could also open the door to thousands of non-gipsies putting mobile homes in fields and gardens for their parents or children.’ The Daily Mail is spurred to make its own comment (on page 8). Once more, it complains, Britain has faced ‘foreign judges in an alien court’ and ‘lost’. It may seem like ‘small beer’, but this ‘judgement’ could lead to ‘a flood of people’ putting ‘their caravans anywhere they like’. The rhetoric builds to a climax:

It may be time to change our polite, gentlemanly approach. Bad enough that we regularly have to submit to that other European Court… But when we also feel obliged to swallow the most crass decisions of the entirely separate Court of Human Rights, the limit has been reached … the Government should insist on judgement in the proper place. Before the British courts.

(Daily Mail, 22 September, page 8)

Meanwhile on page 5, the newspaper of the year carries another gloomy story. It is a ‘Tale of two families’, called ‘the Smiths’ and ‘the Monks’. The two families are on opposite sides of a dispute between a private estate and an estate currently under construction by a housing association. The two estates, apparently, are ‘a stone’s throw apart’. The owners of the private houses anticipate that the value of their homes will decline by at least 10 per cent when their new neighbours move in. They have a solution to this ‘problem’: they want the council to build a wall between the two estates! The fearless Daily Mail has sought the human story behind this conflict, as the ‘wives go to war’: Tina Smith has led the campaign for ‘segregation’, while Tina Monk is amongst the 63 potential tenants. The women have already been in doorstep confrontation, which – the Daily Mail sounds disappointed to find – was tense, but peaceful.¹

There isn’t really a full page story here, but the newspaper of the year pads it out with some interesting comparisons. The Smith husband earns £18,000 a year, while the Monk family have an annual income of £10,500 – neither are particularly rich, nor especially poor. Money is tight for both families. Hardly grounds for the ‘fear’ that appears to have been provoked by these allegedly ‘undesirable poor’. The real problem, for Tina Smith, seems to be that families like the Monks, who have eight children and ‘may have more babies’, will be moving into the nearby estate. It is the presence of ‘poor’ children, within ‘a stone’s throw’, which is actually going to be undesirable. In the end, Tina Smith says that she isn’t ‘a snob’, all she wants is to ‘protect the value of my property’ (which her husband works all hours to pay for), while Tina Monk thinks that ‘all this fuss is silly’; she concludes that ‘if they want to put up a wall, that’s their business’.

These two stories are of quite different orders,² but they help illustrate what is at stake in juxtaposing a geographical and a psychoanalytic imagination. At one level, these stories are easy to interpret: the first tells of racism (the ‘English Gent’ versus ‘Johnny Foreigner’), while the second is about the tension between middle-class and working-class interests (the Smiths versus the Monks). So far, neither geography nor psychoanalysis is essential to these interpretations. On the other hand, these stories tell of border disputes and of the ‘shock’, ‘fear’ and ‘fury’ that the transgression of borders provokes. These are stories about the intertwining of territories and feelings, about demonised others, and about senses of self and space. It is clear to me that these situations cannot be fully understood without a geographical and a psychoanalytic appreciation of the ‘psycho-spatial’ dynamics. Let me briefly tease out some ideas, which I think will introduce the substantive concerns of this book.

The European ruling that people can set up homes on their own property ought to be something the Daily Mail supports (they have in the past relished campaigns against the ‘little Hitlers’ in ‘loony left’ councils). Nevertheless, it is a ‘shock’, a shock which has two sources. The first is the clash between the space of the sovereign British nation-state and the space of the European Union and its analogues. The battle lines of this ‘invisible’ territorial dispute are familiar: ‘we’ are polite and gentlemanly, ‘they’ are alien, foreign, out of touch and wield arbitrary power over ‘us’, to which ‘they’ have no right. The grounds of this dispute are inherently, and obviously, spatial as well as social. The second source of the shock is just as obvious, but also less so. The banner headline screams ‘GIPSY’. Invidious and disingenuous racism is used to prop up and invigorate xenophobia. Gypsies rarely own the property they live on, and they live and work predominantly in urban areas,³ and are therefore almost wholly excluded, first, from the recommended judgement and, second, from the alleged potential for the despoliation of rural beauty sites.

There is more to this story, though: not only does the narrative produce, mix and circulate racist signifiers, it also infuses them with the intemperate feelings of never named people. Whether these feelings exist or not is irrelevant, the newspaper of the year makes it appear as if these violations of space (by Europeans, by gypsies) are personally felt as violations of the self. Civil servants, lawyers, Tory MPs ‘fear’: they are ‘furious’, threatened, alarmed, and so on. The Mail generates an economy of subjectivity and space which is then sold to the reader by alleging that these incursions into the nation, across borders, into the body could happen ‘anywhere’, as metaphors like ‘bombshell’, ‘open the door’, ‘a flood of people’ anticipate the disintegration of life as the reader knows it. The Daily Mail emphasises and circulates feelings at an unconscious, as well as conscious, level. In this story, the geographical and the psychoanalytic are ever present.

Meanwhile, the idea of the wall between ‘the Smiths’ and ‘the Monks’ makes concrete both the significance of border disputes and the sense of violation of self which comes with the wrong people turning up in the wrong place. The wall is an armour against the other – it is meant to shore up those feelings of ‘fear’ and ‘disgust’: a hard, high, fixed, impermeable boundary on a space which is both urban and bodily. The wall is not yet real, but it is very real: a focus and sign of the exasperation of a group of people. It cements associations between their situation and with Berlin, and maybe Northern Ireland, with other states of terror. Yet, from afar, this terror seems to have no substance – not only do housing association tenants commonly own a proportion of their property, but they also need to convince the housing association of the security of their income. They are not the poorest of the poor, nor are they some kind of unruly underclass. Yet it is to these apparently irrational connotations – mobilised through the idea that these families have ‘eight children’, living only ‘a stone’s throw’ away – that ‘the Smiths’ are responding. The reality of this dispute is clearly about the definition and control over class borders, but there are emotional investments here which go way beyond the cash price of a house.

What is at stake here is an appreciation of the intricate and dynamic ways in which narratives of space and self intertwine. These stories are about the ways in which people gain a sense of who they are, the ways in which space helps tell people their place in the world, and the different places that people are meant to be in the world. So, in the newspaper articles, there are underlying senses of people having a ‘proper place’ and of people who are ‘out of place’. These are simultaneously geographical and psychoanalytic tales, so in this book I have attempted to write a dialogue between, and within, both discourses. I should set the scene for this narrative, first, by providing a thumbnail sketch of psychoanalysis and, then, by thinking about geography and the mind.

THE TERRAE INCOGNITAE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Historically, psychoanalysis is the term given to a system of thought, which was created by Sigmund Freud. Born in 1856, Freud was the son of a moderately successful Jewish wool merchant, living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Originally, Freud trained as a medical doctor, with the ambition of alleviating suffering. In 1886, Freud travelled to Paris to study neurology with Jean-Martin Charcot. This experience led Freud to consider the problem of hysteria: hysterics had bodily symptoms, such as paralysis or lumps in the throat, for which no anatomical cause could be found and which disappeared when the hysteric was hypnotised.⁴ Freud’s initial attempts to cure hysteria and the subsequent failure of his cure, despite some ostensible success,⁵ led him over many years to propose a new system of thought: psychoanalysis. Freud came to believe that the patient’s internal psychic conflict was being symbolically expressed in bodily symptoms – this understanding of the mind and the body remain at the centre of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the existence of an unconscious, the vicissitudes of desire, the secret life of things (for example, phallus-shaped) and the slippages of meaning, and the hiding and inadvertent expression of innermost feelings are often implicit in our common-sense understandings of ourselves. However, Freud’s writings are still controversial and there is nothing in psychoanalysis that is generally accepted.⁶ Most importantly, there has been a tremendous amount of speculation about the realm of the unconscious and the so-called sexual instincts.

Arguably, the most fundamental concern of psychoanalysis is with the existence of a dynamic unconscious. It is by revealing the forces operating in the unconscious that human behaviour (individual and/or group) can be understood. Crudely, the unconscious is an area of psychological functioning that is not accessible to the subject, but which nevertheless has a motivating influence on their everyday lives: their thoughts, feelings and actions. However, the structure and content of the unconscious are a matter of some considerable debate.⁷ For most analysts, however, the unconscious is made up of the residues of infantile experiences and the representatives of the person’s (particularly sexual) drives. Although there is considerable disagreement about how children develop increasingly intricate and dynamic psychological structures, the experiences of early childhood are generally accepted to be critical. Basically, it is argued that the child develops defences against painful experiences, mainly by keeping them away from consciousness and, commonly, by hiding them in the unconscious: this is called repression.

The effect of repression is to produce an internal splitting of the mind into a conscious and an unconscious. The unconscious is not static, but has its own dynamics. Most importantly, while the unconscious does not determine what goes on in the mind, it continually seeks to find expression by fighting a kind of guerrilla war with the conscious: this is most vividly experienced in dreams. It is the unconscious that is responsible for producing feelings, thoughts and actions, which cannot be readily explained by the person experiencing them. Freud’s conception of the unconscious means that consciousness cannot form the basis for understanding human behaviour and experience. People’s choices are motivated and constrained by forces that lie outside their control or easy access.

Moreover, Freud provides a developmental account of the psyche that simultaneously reveals the ways in which people give meaning to their world (of people, events and things) and receive meaning from that world, where they act according to the interactions between these worlds, and where people are resourceful and devious in the ways that they deal with, and express, the pleasures and pains that they live through. Other important aspects of Freud’s work include a theory of dreams and a methodology for interpreting this and other psychic phenomena (such as the infamous Freudian slip), a theory of instincts, and other models of the mind.⁸ Working through the inconsistencies, problems and unacceptable aspects of Freud’s thinking has meant that psychoanalysis has developed many lively schools of thought – varying from ego psychology to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Jungian psychology to feminist reinterpretations of psychoanalytic precepts.

There is another side to this heated debate: Freud’s ideas have been shown to have an implicit moral scheme, which has rightly attracted much criticism and anger. Foucault and Irigaray see psychoanalysis itself as a form of repression, as a micro or macro tactic of power (see Foucault, 1961, 1966; Irigaray, 1974, 1977). Meanwhile, certain feminists have argued that psychotherapy replicates the situation of father–daughter rape (Ward, 1984). From a Marxist perspective, Timpanaro (1976) argues that psychoanalysis is incapable of seeing beyond the ideological level to class interests, while others have argued that it systematically disguises social structures, depersonalises the individual and privatises distress (Brooks, 1973). From this perspective, psychoanalysis is a bourgeois discipline, through which the bourgeoisie confirm their decadence and moral bankruptcy. In this sense, psychoanalysts act as capitalism’s psychic first-aiders. Psychoanalytic discourse, then, is highly contested – both within its borders and from outside. So, any attempt to read the relationship between the subject, space and the social using psychoanalysis must be wary that the letter could be a bomb. And, any encounter between a geographical and a psychoanalytic imagination must be partial and selective (neither discourse is free of corrupt connotations).

More hopefully, much contemporary psychoanalysis is far less concerned with Freud’s endeavour to provide a scientific and/or universal account of the human psyche, than to account for the personal meanings that people produce for themselves as they struggle to cope with, and make sense of, the painful realit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The unknown spaces of the mind
• PART I. Geographies of the Subject
• PART II. Spaces of the Subject
• PART III. The Subject of Space
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index