STYLE AND INTERIOR DESIGN

MAY 2013

TYRANNUS # 5

TYRANNUS - Essays on new categories on style and interior design

dfgfgFIFTH ISSUE - THERAPY

Therapy

It’s not easy to find a resident of Buenos Aires who has not fallen victim to some sort of therapy. While what could be called a micro-culture of subjectivity is nothing new in the city, little is known about what actually goes inside consulting rooms..

Imperial domestic, generic bourgeois, sparse intellectual, cheap Minimalism, post-Freudian Renaissance, psycho-dramatic Scandinavian, Lacanian baroque are just some of the categories that could be applied to the spaces where therapy takes place. Regardless of the aspirational imaginar-ies of each professional, all of these styles attempt to materialize an aesthetic of “the pleasant.”

Analysts, psychologies and other therapists largely agree that their offices must be comfortable. After all, this is where they spend many hours of their lives immersed in the desires, despairs, and bad breath of their patients.

In psychoanalysis, there are two hypotheses on the relationship between therapy and the context in which it ensues, formulations that go beyond the pedestrian idea that a pretty place is conducive to pleasant thoughts and a harmonious connection.

One hypothesis holds that context is important and should remain constant. This means an ascetic and neutral space devoid of references to the personal life of the analyst, a stranger who never reveals anything about himself.An anonymous environment would serve to overcome repression and a lack of external stimulation to turn thought inward. The other hypothesis holds that context in no way conditions therapy, which depends solely on the tie with the patient. Those who subscribe to this idea have free reign to decorate as they like, disclosing personal information about themselves. Indeed, the offices of therapists who support this theory may even be in their homes.

Sigmund Freud, for instance, was bound by no rules in the office-study in his home first in Vienna and then in London. Indeed, he sometimes saw patients outside his office, like Gustav Mahler who was treated successfully while the two men walked through Leiden.

The couch, it would seem, is the supreme element, the one thing crucial to constituting the therapeutic space. This piece of furniture is essential to psychoanalysis insofar as it guarantees free association by imposing restfulness and serene concentration that erodes repression. Though today the couch is more closely associated with the unconscious than with the feminine

universe or a life of leisure, its advent to psychoanalysis was spontaneous: Freud started using a couch because he was tired of his patients staring at him.

The couch is an object of historical use, a component indispensable to the psychoanalytic setting. This is not the case with other forms of therapies like gestalt, behaviorism, bioenergy, systemic, and psychodrama which have foregone the couch for other types of equipment with other uses.

Rug, cushions, and a lot of empty space provide the context for gestalt therapy. Patient and therapist sit on the floor barefoot to engage in the “empty chair” therapy where the patient plays two roles in an unresolved scene from his or her past.

Patients of systemic therapies sit in a two- or three-seater couch since this approach focuses on relationships and interactions, and often treats families or couples.

Airplane seats or a cockroach in an acrylic box may be found in a cognitive-behaviorist’s office, as these therapies deal with phobias and false beliefs engrained in patients’ psyches.

Regardless of therapeutic school, therapists’ offices are places of reflection more akin to a home than a clinic. Yet, they are gloomier than a living room, less passive than a bedroom, and more serene than a study.

The association with the domestic, though, seems to take shape in conjunction with the patient, who often develops a particular sensitivity about his or her consulting room, a place that ultimately has an intimate use. Patients are often resistant to changes in a therapist’s office, whether because they are used to it being a certain way or because the office itself has become a transitional object. This is the place where the patient builds his or her ego, quells repression, explores the most intricate paths of his unconscious and expresses her most furtive desires. Indeed, certain items in the office can be the object of an almost magical obsession; the patient wants to control them because she comes to see them as her own.

But are decorative objects and furniture really so innocent? Or are the indisputably sad house-plant, the unbearable taste for locust-tree wood, the Mexican hat behind plastic wrap, the altar to Racing soccer time, the image of Sigmund Freud in a wig, and the snapshot of the analyst’s family in Cozumel having a still-unknown effect on the psychic cure of inhabitants of Buenos Aires?

GESTALT THERAPY In private office

SYSTEMIC THERAPYAt a systemic school

Style and Interior Design

FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS Private office in the analyst’s living room

LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSISIn private office

TYRANNUS # 5STYLE AND INTERIOR DESIGN tyrannusorthemode@gmail.com

PSYCHOANALYSISAt a public hospital

GROUP THERAPY