The Architecture of Psychoanalysis Spaces of Transition The Architecture of Psychoanalysis Spaces of Transition Jane Rendell For David p. 1 p. 97 May Morn May Mourn p. 17 p. 113 The Lost Object The Setting p. 33 p. 129 The Narkomfin Communal House, The Alton Estate, Roehampton, London Moscow (1928–9)/2012–15 (1954–8)/2012–15 p. 49 p. 145 Longing for the Lightness of Spring Moss Green p. 65 p. 161 The Transitional Object Afterwardsness p. 81 p. 177 Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles The Children’s Home Laboratory, (1947–52)/2012–15 Moscow (1921–5)/2012–15 p. 193 Afterwords p. 209 Figurations p. 225 Forwards p. 241 Acknowledgements p. 243 Notes p. 275 Bibliography p. 287 Image Credits p. 291 Index May Morn 2 The house is beautiful – a one-storey building, with a square plan – born at the birth of modernism in the aftermath of World War I. It embodies the values of early English modernism, of the Arts and Crafts movement: ‘truth to materials’ and honest craftsmanship. 3 4 looks the a little it road From unloved, in care need some of and attention. 5 6 close is clearlyUp it derelict, almost in ruins. 7 8 We enter a room with windows at each end. Curtains are falling away from the runners. The fabric has been soaked overnight and is drying in the spring afternoon sunshine. 9 10 On the window sill and spilling over onto the floor are piles of old magazines. The pages are stuck together and disintegrate if you try to pull them apart. 11 12 There buildings. of photographs are some One is particularly damp; the corners are soft, the surface is wrinkled. 13 14 It shows a tower block, just completed, empty and pristine, a moss green utopia, the modernist dream dispersing as it soaks up spring rain. 15 The Lost Object The affect corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning – that is, longing for something lost. Thus in melancholia it must be a question of a loss – a loss in instinctual life.2 Freud first mentions melancholia in 1894, in ‘Draft D. On the Etiology and Theory of the Major Neuroses’, where melancholia (linked to mania) is noted as one of seven features in his morphology of the neuroses.3 Writing very shortly afterwards in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud starts to develop his theory of melancholia,4 and associates it with loss of instinct, including in his discussion a figure, ‘Schematic Picture of Sexuality’ (1895). But although much of Freud’s conceptual thinking on loss took place during his research on hysteria in the early to mid 1890s, he did not return to address melancholia until over 20 years later. In his paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, written in 1915 but not published until 1917, Freud defines mourning as a reaction to the loss of a loved person or ideal, but notes that while there is nothing about mourning that is unconscious, ‘melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness’.5 He writes: 18 In melancholia the relation to the object is no simple one; it is complicated 19 by the conflict due to ambivalence […] In melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other […] The location of these separate struggles cannot be assigned to any system but the Ucs., the region of the memory-traces of things (as contrasted with word-cathexes).6 In Freud’s later understanding of melancholia he differentiates it from mourning; for him, mourning is a process where a subject comes to terms with the loss of a loved object despite having a strong unconscious attachment to it, whereas in melancholia the subject cannot integrate the loss and instead the ego identifies with the lost object, resulting in self-persecution. Today melancholia might be better described as depression, an emotional condition connected to a loss of self-esteem. In Freud’s melancholia it is not so much that the subject is not able to mourn the loss of a particular person or thing, but rather that the subject becomes attached to the experience of loss itself. This is a topical problem in that our life today is different from our former life; we cannot in fact insert the new content into forms that were still valid yesterday, that we use only through tradition and habit, but that are no longer adapted to contemporary life.1 The notion of a memory-trace, or mnemic image, also derives from Freud’s earliest work. In his studies of aphasia from 1891, a figure, ‘Psychological Schema of the Word Concept’,8 shows conscious and unconscious memory-traces as two complexes – ‘word-’ and ‘object-associations’ – which are arranged like branches on a tree. According to Freud, ‘word-associations’ exist in an open network consisting of ‘visual image for print’, ‘visual image for script’, ‘kinaesthetic image’ and ‘sound image’; whereas ‘object-associations’ produce a closed network comprising registers that are ‘visual’, ‘tactile’ and ‘auditory’.9 For Freud, hysteria is associated with the return of a memory; the content of a recurring hysterical attack is the return of a psychical state that the patient has experienced earlier.10 Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis summarise how in The Studies on Hysteria (1893–5) Freud explores the way mnemic or memory-traces are stored in an archival fashion according to several methods of classification, including chronology, position in chains of association and accessibility to consciousness.11 This archival system allows a single event to be stored in various places: connected with perception, with memory and with the presentation of ideas or Vorstellung. In ‘The Project’ (1895), Freud differentiated between perceptual cells 12 20 and mnemic cells, perceptual images (Wahmehmungsbild) and mnemic images 21 (Erinnerungsbild).13 Following Josef Breuer, Freud reasoned that it was not possible for the same system to operate both in terms of perception, as the ‘mirror of a reflecting telescope’, and in terms of memory, as a ‘photographic plate’, and instead he suggested that separate systems of registration existed.14 Freud explained his thinking on this to Fliess in his letter of 6 December 1896 using a ‘schematic picture’ accompanied by the following written explanation: As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various kinds of indications. I postulated a similar kind of re-arrangement some time ago (Aphasia) for the paths leading from the periphery [of the body to the cortex]. I cannot say how many of these registrations there are: at least three, probably more.15 To reply to this problem is to break with past habits.7 The figures shows how one event may be registered in different ‘mnemic systems’, showing the three key terms: Wz [Wahrnehmungszeichen (indication of perception)], or the first registration of perceptions; Ub Unbewusstsein[ (unconsciousness)], or the second registration arranged according to causal relations and linked to conceptual memory; and Vb [Vorbewusstsein (preconsciousness)], or the third transcription attached to word-presentation and corresponding to the ego.18 In ‘The Project’ W [Wahrnehmungen (perceptions)] are neurones in which Freud had looked specifically at the screening of an early memory by a later event.19 perceptions originate, to which consciousness attaches, but With reference to the case history of Emma, Freud investigated how the laughter of which in themselves retain no trace of what has happened. shop assistants in a later scene ‘aroused (unconsciously) the memory’ of the grin For consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive. of the shopkeeper who had ‘seduced’ Emma in an earlier one.20 Freud subsequently develops this later ‘resurfacing’ of the traces of childhood events, not registered Wz [Wahrnehmungszeichen (indication of perception)] is the consciously at the time, into his two-phase model of trauma, Nachträglichkeit, first registration of the perceptions; it is quite incapable of first mentioned in the letter to Fliess from 6 December 1896. Commenting later, consciousness and is arranged according to associations by two French psychoanalysts who have worked closely with Freud’s ideas describe simultaneity. nachträglichkeit, in the case of André Green, like this: ‘Trauma does not consist only Ub [Unbewusstsein (unconsciousness)] is the second or essentially in its original occurrence (the earliest scene), but in its retrospective registration, arranged according to other, perhaps causal, recollection (the latest scene)’;21 and for Jean Laplanche: relations. Ub traces would perhaps correspond to conceptual 22 What is subject to the work of distortion and rearrangement in memory are 23 memories: equally inaccessible to consciousness. not the childhood events (intrinsically inaccessible), but the first traces of Vb [Vorbewusstsein (preconsciousness)] is the third transcription, them […] The result of the secondary elaboration which is Freud’s interest attached to word presentation and corresponding to our here is the conscious memory: very precisely, the ‘screen memory’. But to official ego. The cathexes proceeding from this Vb become evoke this term (Deckerinnerung) is to indicate that it both covers over and conscious according to certain rules; and this secondary thought presents the