The
project of Paul Carter’s book, Repressed
Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia, begins with — is, in fact, propelled
by — an anecdote from Theodor Reik’s The
Search Within.  One night Reik was
walking with Freud in the Kaerterstrasse in Vienna.  As the two men prepared to cross a busy street, Freud hesitated
on the curbside, as if frozen.  Freud
took hold of Reik’s arm and confessed, "You see, there is a survival of my
old agoraphobia, which troubled me much in younger years."

            Freud made little of his own fear of
open spaces in his autobiographical comments. 
Indeed, few if any of Freud’s biographers have spent time considering
the importance of Freud’s agoraphobia to his own psychic history, or the
development of psychoanalytic theory, generally.  Reik, however, saw in Freud’s passing remark "the hidden missing
link" between Freud’s early psychological interests and his "later
occupation with the neuroses."

In
other words, Freud’s later work on the dream was an attempt to find common
ground (the metaphor is intentional) between the minds of sick and healthy
people, or between normal and abnormal mental activities.  The dream was, after all, an "abnormal
mental product created by normal people" and thus a bridge between what
Reik calls the "limited island" of Freud’s own neurosis to the
"larger continent of general pathology and psychology."  Note the preponderance of spatial metaphors

According
to Reik’s analysis, Freud’s ingenious attempt to link neurosis and
psychopathology was motivated by his own
fear of open spaces — a kind of compensatory transversal of a seemingly
non-negotiable terrain.   Paul Carter
takes this further: what if, at the origin of psychoanalysis, "an environmental neurosis had been
repressed?"  Freud’s hesitation at
the curb of a heavily trafficked street was entirely reasonable, says Carter;
his faltering was a healthy response to the unhealthy and dangerous speed, and
increased volume, of Viennese traffic rather than a symptomatic turning away
from his own unruly instinctual drives. 

This
leads Carter to ask two questions that shape his overall inquiry:

"Why did
Freud repress the unconscious drives shaping his own environment? And what
would be the consequence of attending to these and therapeutically unrepressing them?"  Carter finds in psychoanalysis a
"repressed environmental unconscious" which has shaped discourse
about space and agoraphobia since the genesis of Freudian thinking.

            Paul Carter writes not as a
psychoanalyst but as a historian of culture, colonialism and spatial
design.  His earlier books, The Road to Botany Bay (1987) and The Lie of the Land (1996), each explore
the relationships among colonialism, landscape and ideology.  Repressed
Spaces is a kind of archaeological retrieval of agoraphobia as a
"realistic" anxiety about the loss of human-scale spaces and the
ideology of contemporary urban architecture and city planning.  The book attempts to recast agoraphobia as a
movement inhibition rather than an
irrational and merely symptomatic response to terrain.

Repress
the "lie of the land" and you engender panic in people, argues
Carter.  The Greek agora was a "natural" meeting-place, scoured out by a
"surplus of paths" and "wedge-shaped islands, turning circles
and terraces — in short, every kind of locomotory trace" (186).   The Roman forum, on the other hand, was
both estranging and dangerous.  When the
Romans drained what Varro called a "swampy spot" and built over a
sacred brook to create an artificial "open space," they transgressed
not only religious law but also ignored good engineering practice and sound
architectural sense.  The agora was homey and welcoming; the forum
was regarded by many as dangerous and impassible. 

            How, then, did agoraphobia become
the byproduct of a repressed fear of something other than space — something else — when its immediate object is so
pervasive?   When Freud took that
fateful step into the dangerous, whirling whorl of traffic that was the Ringstrasse in his day, his hesitation
was entirely rational. 
"Immobility," writes Carter, "is produced not by a lack
of directions, but by an excess of them" (17). 

            Carter is more interested in
surveying kinetic theories of agoraphobia than environmental ones.  Carter’s focus on the relationship between
human motility and modern architecture is guided by a consideration of the
writings of Camillo Sitte, whose famous 1889 treatise, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (City Planning
According to Artistic Principles) launched the first sustained critique of
modern city planning and architecture, and made of him what Carter calls
"a kind of environmental Freud." 

According
to Sitte, the then-predominant models of urban planning created conditions
which were as alienating as they were hazardous, and especially for
walkers.  Planners and architects had
become so concerned with the free-flow of "traffic" and the creation
of broad boulevards and squares created to accommodate bustle that they
neglected the human-scale arrangement of plazas and streets — to the detriment
of human well-being.  Carter quotes
Sitte approvingly when he writes, "the right kind of square could lift
from the soul of modern man the curse of urban loneliness and the fear of the
vast and bustling void.  Anonymous space
is transmuted by the containing sides of a square into a human scene, infinite
urban riches in a little room" (24). 

So,
writes Carter, Sitte regarded agoraphobia, as it had come to be defined by
students of culture and psychology, as an oxymoron.  If the classical agora’s distinguishing features were its
"sociability and homeliness" why would anyone be stricken with fear
in its presence?  Writes Carter:
"As an anxiety or discomfort experienced in traversing vast open places,
the new nervous disorder was an anti-agora
phobia, a panic associated with a new species of non-place" (121). 

According
to Carter, Sitte wished to inspire agoraphilia
in urban planners — an appreciation for old squares, rising prospects,
winding streets and historical markers, which would refamiliarize the urban
landscape rather than repeatedly cast it into the realm of the unfamiliar and
uncanny.  Sitte encouraged architects
and city planners to fuse their disciplines with the plastic and graphic arts
rather than making city streets bald expressions of applied geometry.  In many ways, says Carter, Sitte’s critique
anticipated Walter Benjamin’s essays on the nineteenth-century arcades of Paris
"which, being closed off from the outdoors, encouraged a phantasmagoric
existence" (122). 

            While the phantasmagoric existence
of enclosed and artificial spaces –or what a neo-Marxist, following Althusser,
might call "imaginary relations" — might engender agoraphobic
responses, the response is anything but phantasmal.  Carter is careful to point out that the distinctive unease of the
agoraphobe’s reaction is quite real:

On
this reading, agoraphobia stems from the prospect of places being opened up
that are not places.  The crisis occurs
as a confrontation with make-believe spaces. 
The opening they promise is infinitely estranging.  The enlarged access they offer produces a
concomitant anomie.  A sense of vertigo is accompanied by a fear
of asphyxiation: maximum mobility accompanied by maximum petrification —
agora-claustro-phobia.  The double-bind
sensation arises from a sudden awareness of a lost relation.  Characteristics of sociable space that had
been taken for granted become conspicuous by their absence.  Qualities of orientation, proximity and
grouping, and their behavioural counterparts, gathering, lingering and the
general gymnastic of a rhetorically conducted social existence, are missing
(210).

            Carter’s fourth chapter, entitled
"Meeting," brings artist Alberto Giacometti into conversation with
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, in an attempt to imagine what an urban landscape
built around "possible paths of propinquity" rather than metropolitan
estrangement might look like.  Giacometti’s
sculptural compositions such as The City
Square (1948) are attempts to capture the sense of people coming together
and then drifting apart — the urban dynamic of seemingly making "contact
anew" on an ongoing basis.  Carter
likens this to Levinas’s phenomenological thematization of the human face as
always seeming to "come from beyond" in human encounters, whereby the
"Other is higher than I am." 
Both Giacometti and Levinas imagine public spaces constructed to
encourage human meetings, and to encourage their conviviality, as well. 

Carter’s
argument is not new.  He is one among
many writers to offer a theoretical diagnosis of the dehumanization of
contemporary urban space.  But his
discussion of agoraphobia as an understandable reaction to the imaginary places
of contemporary urbanism, as well as the repressed "environmental
unconscious" of psychoanalysis itself, is original, and often
convincing. 

This
reader would have liked to see Carter extend his critique to include a
discussion of the so-called "New Urbanism/Traditional Neighborhood
Development" movement — which combines the worst features of suburban
sprawl with the very distortions of urban planning decried by Carter.  Interested readers will have to turn instead
to a study like Alex Marshall’s How
Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken to see how many of
Carter’s pointed psychoanalytic observations might apply to the "New
Urbanism," as well. 

 

© 2003 Gerard O’Sullivan

 

Gerard
O’Sullivan, Felician College, New Jersey

Categories: MentalHealth, Anxiety, Psychoanalysis