My Neighbour My Self in the Ethics of Architecture and Psychoanalysis

The figure of the neighbour remains the principal site for our ethical duty to others in religious and secular cultures; and yet the neighbour is a problematic figure in psychoanalysis and collective life, not least because it is also the site of alterity and alienation. ‘My Neighbour My Self’ reads Lacan’s Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in order to trace the consequences for Lacan, of shifting the ethical debate from the religious commandment love thy neighbour as thyself, which goes in the direction of identity and aggression, to Freud’s dictum, Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. In Lacan’s translation: the locus where the subject was, there I must come into being—it is the ethical duty of the subject to itself and to others, to inhabit the place of its unconscious desire. This paper argues that the neighbour appears in architectural discourse in the form of party walls and party wall stories like ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ where the lover replaces the neighbour. The aim of this paper is to treat the figure of the neighbour as both an ethical and territorial category in order to write an ethics through psychoanalysis and architecture, which will have implications for public life. This paper links architecture with desire, the pleasure principle, and aggression, and thus opens up a number of questions relating to architecture’s capacity to address the discontent caused by civilisation.