Architecture and the Mimetic Self : A Psychoanalytic Study of How Buildings Make and Break Our Lives.

Cover -- Half Title -- Endorsement -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1 Introduction: Buildings design us as much as we them -- Architectural blueprints of being -- The chapters -- Notes -- Chapter 2 Architectural blueprints of psyche -- Breuer's house of hysteria (1893-1895) -- Freud's architecture of psyche -- Freud's buildings of hysteria -- Architectural Rome as City of Memory -- Psychosomatic houses of Freud and Scherner -- The houses that Jung built -- Jung's dream-house of psyche (1909) -- 228 Seestrasse in Küsnacht and the upper storey of the dream-house -- The rectory at Basle, the 'tower' at Bollingen, and the lower storeys of the dream-house -- Buildings gaze back -- Conclusion: building the self and the self within buildings -- Notes -- Chapter 3 The architectural event: Buildings as events that disclose our being -- Building enduring structures for ourselves -- Architecture that inhibits -- Architecture as event and container of infinite surplus -- The symbolic nature of buildings -- Imaginative perception -- Discovering ourselves through architecture -- Notes -- Chapter 4 The body's role in the architectural event: Fortification and containment -- Unstable bodies, unstable architecture -- Mimesis -- Freudian mimesis -- Lacan's statue -- Touching the skin-ego -- Psychoanalytic resistance to the nonhuman environment and architectural object -- Reinstating architecture as mother's accomplice -- The affective built environment prior to mother -- Buildings facilitate vital separation from mother -- Conclusion: the flesh of the building and the building of flesh -- Notes -- Chapter 5 Using architecture to think ourselves into being -- 'Thinking' unconsciously -- Creative potentials of unconscious thinking -- Henri Poincaré's creative distractions.

Stages of creative thinking -- The 'dream-work': building blocks of unconscious insight and evocative architectural design -- Architecture that distracts, perplexes, and surprises -- The distracting spatial procedures of the dream-work -- Disclosing unconscious insights through evocative architecture -- Revisiting Freud at the Acropolis: Freud's memory building -- Conclusion: buildings are inscriptions of us -- Notes -- Chapter 6 The self that is disclosed through architecture -- Different models of the unconscious lead to different architectural insights -- The uncanny: the unconscious as it gathers and unfolds its surprise -- Disclosing unconscious material: sublime and numinous surprises -- Sublime insights -- Numinous insights -- Uncanny, sublime, or numinous architecture? How to tell the difference -- Anaesthetic architecture: the problem of the 'American sublime', and the need for ugliness -- Ugliness and distortion -- Notes -- Chapter 7 Conclusion: architecture that captures the imagination -- Making banal buildings evocative by enhancing our capacity to notice them -- Attending to the unexpected: noticing the unfamiliar within the most familiar of places -- The significance of wandering for wondering -- Reawakening architecture -- A journey about a room, pedestrian explorers, and the freedom to run through architecture -- Designing for our existential needs -- The need for gaps and breaks -- Ambiguous and contrasting features are evocative -- The interplay of shadow and light -- Incorporating the radical within the conventional -- Koolhaas and the problematic surrealist approach -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Plates.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.