Afterword

Andrew Payne provides an inspired Afterword to the volume. He evokes Lacan’s structuralist return to Freud and its relevance to architecture. Lacan’s structural determinations of language have great applications to architecture. Payne emphasizes Freud’s science of the psyche, and his focus on drives. Freud’s insistence on the human being’s maladapted relationship to its milieu led Lacan to define the human being in the context of language and separate from nature, and laid the groundwork for seeing the theory and practice of architecture as among the key disciplinary practices that shape the human milieu. Thus, the necessity of applying psychoanalysis to architecture. Lacan’s linguistic turn requires a revision of philosophy and a new “transcendental aesthetic” in which “psyche is extended.” Payne summarizes how each chapter in this volume addresses the architectural implications of Lacan’s return to Freud, and how the modern human subject relates to its environment. Our relationship to our environment is at the core of human existence and architectural practice, and psychoanalysis can contribute a great deal to understanding that relationship.