Psychosis and the ineffable space of modernism

Abstract

The aim of this psychoanalytic reflection on architecture is to reclaim for space its symbolic and contingent status. It returns to Le Corbusier's concept of ineffable space, a radiant space of explosive energy, in order to link it to the psychoanalytic concept of psychosis. In psychosis, the subject is decoupled from its reality because a key component of the subject's symbolic framework—what Jacques Lacan calls the master signifier—is foreclosed to it. It is not repressed and hence unconscious, it simply does not exist for the subject. This paper outlines the theory of psychosis in psychoanalysis and argues that perspective, in which space seems always already organised for the viewer, is such a symbolic frame. Le Corbusier's vision of ineffable space is a vision of space in which this frame is foreclosed to its subject, the viewer. In its absence, the subject finds itself detached in a dynamic fluidity that elides the familiar spatial territories of inside/outside, near/far… In the literature of philosophy, cultural criticism and the social sciences, psychosis is regarded as a subjective position within the social-cultural field. This paper extends this use of psychosis to space; it concludes by situating architecture within this broader disciplinary context.