Psychoanalytic Theory/Psychoanalytic Geographies

Abstract

This article explores how psychoanalytic theory has been adopted and adapted by human geographers since the early 1990s. The article is composed of three sections. The first section illustrates some fundamental theoretical tenets of psychoanalysis. Specifically, the focus is on why psychoanalysis devotes so much attention to the concept of the unconscious, as well as how psychoanalysis theorizes causality and psychological effects. The second section addresses why geographers first turned to psychoanalytic theory. Here, how three major psychoanalytic theoretical approaches inform contemporary psychoanalytic geography are illustrated: first, geographers use the theories of Sigmund Freud to address the themes of imaginative geographies, urban phantasmagorias, spatial oppression, as well as racist and uncanny landscapes. Second, drawing on the works by and those associated with Jacques Lacan, geographers have investigated patriarchal and masculinist modes of knowing and representing, as well as the social bonds of enjoyment and antagonism. Finally, following object relations theory, geographers study spaces of exclusion and the discrepant, as well as the spatial processes of children's identity formation. In the final concluding section, the article briefly discusses the similarities and differences between psychoanalysis and other major theoretical trajectories in human geography.