Institute of Geography Online Paper Series: GEO-035
Psychoanalytic theory
Entry for the Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th Edition
Liz Bondi
Institute of Geography
The University of Edinburgh
Drummond Street
Edinburgh EH8 9XP
Scotland, UK
liz.bondi@ed.ac.uk
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Liz Bondi (2007) Psychoanalytic theory, online papers archived by the Institute of
Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh.
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Psychoanalytic theory and practice originated in the late nineteenth century in the
work of Sigmund Freud (1956-1939). It offers a distinctive way of thinking about the
human mind and of responding to psychological distress. Psychoanalysis has
travelled widely from its central European origins, and has evolved into a complex,
multi-facetted and internally fractured body of knowledge situated at the interface
between the human and natural sciences, and between clinical practice and
academic theory. Notwithstanding critiques of its Eurocentric origins, psychoanalysis
has been taken up in many different cultural contexts, perhaps most notably in Latin
America but also in India, Japan and elsewhere. Its geography and spatiality have
become topics for geographical study albeit primarily within the Anglophone literature
(Cameron, 2006; Kingsbury, 2003).
Along with the more general rise of psychological thinking, psychoanalytic ideas have
had a pervasive influence on such arenas of life as child-rearing, education and
popular culture. Within the academy, psychoanalytic theory has been taken up most
extensively in the humanities and more sporadically in the social sciences including
human geography, where a distinct subdiscipline of psychoanalytic geography has
shown tentative signs of formation since around turn of the twenty-first century.
The unconscious is perhaps the most fundamental and defining idea of
psychoanalysis, albeit one that has a much longer history. For Freud only a small
proportion of the human mind is knowable through rational thought. The greater part
is outside conscious awareness and full of hidden dangers. It makes its presence felt
in a variety of ways including dreams, slips of the tongue, the clinical method of “free
association”, and other actions the motivations for which are not discernible by, and
are often contrary to, conscious intent. The psychoanalytic unconscious acts as the
repository for experiences, thoughts and feelings that are unacceptable to, and are
repressed by, the conscious mind. The unconscious therefore exemplifies a means
by which rational HUMAN AGENCY is “de-centred” in the sense of not being the
driving force of human action, an idea that has been highly influential in human
geography. The radical OTHERNESS, profound strangeness and disruptiveness of
Freud’s concept of the unconscious is emphasised by Felicity Callard (2003) in her
review of geographers’ engagements with psychoanalytic theory.
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Freud developed his ideas over a period of nearly 50 years. Not surprisingly there
are shifts, tensions and ambiguities within his work. Moreover, he founded an
approach taken up by many others, who have variously extended, challenged,
supplemented and reworked his ideas. One of the most influential lines of
differentiation within the psychoanalytic tradition lies between those theorists who
attach primary importance to the psychic life generated by the instinctual drives of the
human organism, including especially drives towards pleasure and towards death or
annihilation, and those theorists who attach primary importance to the psychic life
generated by a different kind of drive or condition of existence, namely the drive to
relate to others. Among the former, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-
1981) has been especially influential, while the latter has given rise of object relations
theory and other relational approaches to psychoanalysis, developed through such
theorists as Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and Donald Winnicott (1896-1971).
Human geographers have engaged with different strands of psychoanalysis for a
variety of purposes. One of the earliest examples in the Anglophone literature was
methodological in focus and drew as much on psychoanalytic practice as theory:
Jacquelin Burgess and colleagues (Burgess, Limb and Harrison, 1988) applied ideas
from group analysis (a form of psychoanalysis that focuses on the relationship
between individuals and their social context) to facilitate the exploration of
environmental values in FOCUS GROUPS. Continuing this methodological theme,
others have appealed to key ideas informing psychoanalytic practices to deepen and
enrich understandings of the dynamics in play within research encounters (Bondi,
2005). Yet others have drawn on approaches derived from Carl Jung’s analytic
psychology to facilitate research participants to connect with unconscious childhood
experience (Bingley, 2003).
Several human geographers have deployed psychoanalytic theories to develop
accounts of human SUBJECTIVITY and its spatial forms. In a highly influential
contribution, David Sibley (1995) examines geographies of exclusion combining
Melanie Klein’s object relations account of the unconscious expulsion of feared and
dreaded aspects of our selves, with the post-Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s
discussion of the fascination and horror, preoccupation and repulsion associated with
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that which is expelled. Using these ideas, Sibley (1995) illuminates the profound
emotional power of exclusionary processes for the different groups whose members
identify with each other and against others in ways that generate highly potent lines
of demarcation. While Sibley’s (1995) account draws primarily on object relations
psychoanalysis, Robert Wilton (2003) draws on Freud’s concept of castration
together with Lacan’s reworking to explore how the geographical exclusion of
disabled people may serve to shore up illusions of “ableism”. Lacanian readings of
Freud are also evident in geographical accounts of topics such as RACISM (Nast,
2000) and embodied experiences of cities (Pile, 1996).
A product of nineteenth century European culture, Freud hypothesised that the
repressed unconscious contains much material of a sexual nature, which would be
highly disruptive if allowed to break through into consciousness. He argued that, in
order to grow up in socially acceptable ways, boys and girls were called upon to
repress their “natural”, sexual (or libidinal) desires. Normative heterosexual
masculinity and femininity were theorised by Freud as demanding psychical
achievements. Although aspects of his theories of GENDER and sexual identity have
been highly controversial, his approach has also been welcomed as a resource for
challenging assumptions about what is “natural”, and for elaborating a theory of
subjectivity as situated in a zone of creative interplay between the “personal” and the
“cultural”. For this reason, some feminist geographers have turned to psychoanalysis
in their theorisations of the interplay between gender, SEXUALITY, subjectivity and
space, and to contribute to critiques of the “masculinism” of dominant forms of
knowledge (Nast, 2000; Rose, 1996). Against critics who consider psychoanalysis to
be an intrinsically individualistic theory and practice, these applications find it offers a
powerful way of understanding how social and cultural milieux are embodied and
personalised by human individuals, as well as how unconscious aspects of human
life are manifest in the social world.
LB
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References
Bingley, A. 2003: In here and out there: sensations between Self and landscape
Social and Cultural Geography 4: 329-345.
Bondi, L. 2005: Making connections and thinking through emotions: between
geography and psychotherapy Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
30: 433-448.
Burgess, J., Limb, M. and Harrison, C.M. 1988: Exploring environmental values
through small groups. Part one: theory and practice. Environment and Planning A 20:
457-476.
Callard, F. 2003: The taming of psychoanalysis in geography. Social and Cultural
Geography 4: 295-312.
Cameron, L. 2006: Science, nature, and hatred: ‘finding out’ at the Malting House
Garden School, 1924 – 29. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24:
851-872.
Kingsbury, P. 2003: Psychoanalysis, a gay spatial science? Social and Cultural
Geography 4: 347-367.
Nast, H. 2000: Mapping the “unconscious”: racism and the oedipal family Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 90: 215-255.
Pile, S. 1996: The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity.
London: Routledge.
Rose, G. 1996: As if the mirrors bled: masculine dwelling, masculine theory and
feminist masquerade. In N. Duncan, ed. BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of
Gender and Sexuality. London: Routledge, 56-74.
Sibley, D. 1995: Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West.
London: Routledge.
Wilton, R. 2003: Locating physical disability in Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis: problems and prospects Social and Cultural Geography 4: 369-389.
Suggested reading
Bondi, L. 2005: Making connections and thinking through emotions: between
geography and psychotherapy Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
30: 433-448.
Callard, F. 2003: The taming of psychoanalysis in geography. Social and Cultural
Geography 4: 295-312.
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Craib, I. 1990: Psychoanalysis and Social Theory. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press.
Sibley, D. 2003: Geography and psychoanalysis: tensions and possibilities Social
and Cultural Geography 4: 391-399
