The Permeable Threshold: Architecture and the Psychoanalysis of Children

Cameron White

13 April 2009

Adviser: Spyros PapapetrosSecond Reader: Christine Boyer

A Senior thesis submitted to the School of Architecture of Princeton University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of the Bachelor of Arts in Architecture.

The author would like to extend his sincere gratitude to Professor Spyros Papapetros for

his guidance and patience in the preparation of this work.

Thanks to my mother, Patty, my father, Ronnie, and my brother, Kyle, for their love and

support throughout my academic career, especially in this final year at Princeton.

And thanks to all my friends, for everything you do.

Table of Contents

Introduction 5

Psychological Projection and Enclosure: Freud, Klein, and Ravel 10

Creativity and the Permeable Boundary: Winnicott, Rank, and Neutra 36

Enculturation and the Architectural Threshold: Piaget and Van Eyck 61

Image List 81

Reference List 82

Introduction

Manmade objects profoundly influence spatial experience, serving a central role

in personal and collective memory formation while providing a material backdrop for

social interaction. It is not surprising, then, that the significance of the architectural

environment becomes even more pronounced when considering the child’s psychological

development. Indeed, the child’s spatial experience takes place within a unique context;

his or her understanding of objects comes not from societal norms, but rather from a less

culturally determined set of criteria. Yet, despite the importance of architectural design in

this regard, such considerations are often undermined in deference to tradition or other

cultural preconceptions.

The artificially imposed disconnect between the professional practices of planning

and construction and the naïve processes of childhood is symptomatic of a broader

tendency to rely on professional expertise to impose decisions from the top-down, with

minimal regard for the specific context into which they are interjected. Architectural

design in particular is viewed as requiring a nuanced and refined set of skills far beyond

the grasp of the non-professional. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of architecture – along with

its role in shaping the child’s experience and its relative lack of intellectual accessibility –

reinforces the need to carefully consider the effects of design decisions upon the child’s

psychological development.

Societal denial of the significance of the child’s perspective is exemplified in the

conceptual foundation of applied psychology, which remains prominent as a method of

facilitating an individual’s behavioral adaptation by eliminating outward manifestations

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of psychological idiosyncrasy within a particular cultural context. Whereas

psychoanalytic therapy seeks to uncover the unconscious mechanisms – often rooted in

childhood experience – that underlie neurotic behavior, applied psychology aims to alter

or eliminate the subject’s outward symptoms in order to encourage conformity to a set of

culturally-defined norms and values.

Founded upon the writings of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), early psychoanalytic

theory argues for the importance of childhood experience within an individual’s

psychological development. Specifically, Freud differentiates conscious from

unconscious psychological processes, and describes the ego as a boundary mediating an

individual’s internal reality and the external reality of cultural experience.1 Along these

lines, Freud defines “projection” as a response to otherwise inescapable internal

anxieties, “a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but

from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into

operation as a means of defen[s]e against them.”2 Similarly, Freud understood

“introjection” as acting in the opposite direction, a process by which objects in the

external world are incorporated into an individual’s internal reality during early stages of

psychosexual development.3 The appeal of a view that recognizes the importance of the

individual and the validity of his or her experiential reality is made evident by the

infiltration of psychoanalytic theory into objects of contemporary culture, such as Ravel

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1 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973: 130-43.2 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74: 29.3 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973: 229-31.

and Colette’s operetta L’Enfant et les Sortileges [The Child and the Spells]. The

importance of projection in the opera is emphasized in a review by psychoanalyst

Melanie Klein, who – along with post-Freudian analyst Otto Rank – was instrumental in

the development of the study of object-relations.

Later in the twentieth century, the writings of D. W. Winnicott – based in large

part upon Kleinian and early Rankian theory – recognize the relationship between patient

and therapist as that of subject and object, an insight that he would later extend to reveal

the therapeutic potential of introjection through object-usage. In addition, Winnicott

appropriates Rank’s concerns with the subject’s “milieu” in his reevaluation of the

psychotherapeutic environment, a development with major theoretical consequences

within the realm of architectural discourse. Through his written theories and therapeutic

practice, Winnicott revives the psychoanalytic significance of creativity and play, setting

himself apart from the anti-functionalism of play theorists such as Roger Caillois.

Through his work, Winnicott demonstrates the psychological necessity of an environment

that properly facilitates creative expression, as well as the possibility of play as a means

of dissolving professional barriers to encourage participatory design. Winnicott’s relative

success in the implementation of such therapeutic innovations occurred in parallel to less

celebrated attempts – generally ignored and often ridiculed – to apply these same

principles to architectural design, including the efforts of environmentalist architect

Richard Neutra.

Jean Piaget explores the child’s development of spatial cognition in great detail in

his classical work The Child’s Conception of Space (1948), which provides scientific

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grounding for many of the principles that had been put forth by Winnicott and other post-

Freudian theorists in the early- to mid-twentieth century. According to Piaget, by the time

an individual has reached adulthood he or she has learned to interpret visual cues in order

to understand the spatial characteristics of his or her surroundings. Although in the adult’s

mind such spatial conceptions exist in the realm of objective observation, in fact even

simple geometrical relationships are not inherent properties of perception, but instead

products of cultural conditioning occurring during critical periods of development.4

Children are taught – as part of what is perhaps a cultural expression of humanity’s

evolutionary instinct – to interpret space based on conventions rooted in cultural

doctrines imposed by rational or aesthetic norms. As part of the process of enculturation,

these considerations come to dominate the child’s conscious experience of spatial reality.

Pre-cultural spatial experience refers to the manner in which children experience space

prior to this intellectual and psychological indoctrination.

One of architecture’s primary functions in the adult world is that of physical

enclosure. Equally significant in the world of the child is the role of architecture as a

psychological enclosure. In the same way that all manmade objects impose arbitrary

physical boundaries on the natural world, architectural objects compel users to move, to

rest, to interact – to exist – only within the spatial limits they define. In regards to the

child’s pre-cultural consciousness, then, architecture exists and acts in opposition to the

child’s “instinctual tendency”5 to curiously explore and learn from his or her

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4 Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child’s Conception of Space (1948), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963: 6.5 Anna Freud, “Some Aspects of Instinctual Satisfaction and Frustration in Family and Nursery Life,” in The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume III (1939-1945): Infants without Families: Reports on the Hampstead Nurseries, New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1973: 621.

surroundings. The built world serves as a constant, physical reminder of all the hallmarks

of adult consciousness: Design considerations such as functionalism and aesthetic appeal

are embedded and continually reinforced through the prominence of architectural objects,

which are relatively permanent and unchanging. Moreover, the various ways in which a

given object is used or experienced by a child (unrestricted by societal norms), as well as

his or her perception of the object’s relative position and scale, are often indicative of

fluctuations in the child’s psychological state.

In light of Freud’s characterization of the ego-boundary,6 it becomes clear that

architecture’s role within the context of the child’s experience is two-fold: On the one

hand, the child’s internally-defined psychological reality is projected into objects in the

outer world through creative expression; on the other hand, externally-imposed

architectural objects profoundly affect the child’s inner reality. In this way, the ego-

boundary facilitates both projection and introjection by mediating the child’s interactions

with architectural objects in the outside world. Taken together, these phenomena generate

a complex subject-object pairing between the child and his or her environment,7 which in

turn suggests an opposition between internal and external reality centered around the axis

of the ego-boundary. Moreover, if “the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself

everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad,”8 then architecture

must accept its doubly ambivalent role as the recipient of both immense trust and deep-

rooted hatred – the source of both ominous dread and unconditional compassion.

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6 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915c), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74: 136.7 Ibid.8 Sigmund Freud, “Negation” (1925), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIX, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74: 237.

Chapter 1

Psychological Projection and Enclosure: Freud, Klein, and Ravel

Freud’s conception of the ego-boundary as mediating internal and external reality

had profound implications on the development of psychoanalytic theory. In addition to

recognizing the developmental significance of the child’s interactions with the outside

world, the psychoanalyst’s writings challenged longstanding notions about the nature of

human perception. Rather than an objective feed of sensory data, Freud argues that each

individual’s experience of externality is deeply affected by the character his or her inner

psychology. These ideas seem to relate to works such as L’Enfant et les Sortileges [The

Child and the Spells], an opera by Ravel and Colette that portrays architecture as an

object of the child’s creative impulse. By focusing upon the child’s ambivalence –

marked by his simultaneous love and hatred of the same (maternal-architectural) object –

the opera suggests the possibility of constructive psychological projection, a notion that is

probed by Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her analysis of artistic expression.

The Child and the Spells, or What happens to children who do not do their schoolwork

L’Enfant et les Sortileges [The Child and the Spells] – a libretto by Sidonie-

Gabrielle Colette set to Maurice Ravel’s musical score, first performed in 1925 – stands

out from contemporary works for its exploration of the child’s psychological perspective.

In the libretto’s opening scene Colette’s stage directions account for considerations of

scale in order to visually represent the world as perceived by its child inhabitant:

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Enter Mama (or rather as much as can be seen with the ceiling very low and the entire scale of all the furnishings and all the objects in exaggerated dimensions, in order to make more striking the smallness of the child) that is to say a skirt, the lower part of a silk apron, a steel chain from which hangs a pair of scissors, and a hand. This hand is raised with the index finger pointing.9

This description immediately takes into account the roles of relative size and countenance

in the child’s experience of external objects in his environment: the subject’s “mother” is

deconstructed in a series of partial objects – skirt, apron, scissors, and index finger.

Once she has entered his bedroom, the mother confronts the boy about his

incomplete schoolwork. The boy begins to tantrum, damaging objects as he attempts to

escape his mother’s control. After he is locked in his room as punishment, these same

objects come to life as projections of his rage. The furniture begins to physically and

psychologically attack the child, represented musically in Ravel’s score through “[t]he

succession of different musical styles and genres produced by the animated objects,”

which disrupt the “comfortable familiarity of the environment.”10 Throughout this ordeal

architectural objects are presented to the viewer through a reproduction not of culturally-

defined, “objective” experience, but rather of the child’s psychologically-defined,

distinctly pre-cultural conception of the world.

The child’s fantasy grows increasingly detached from reality: This transition is

represented onstage by his gradual passage from his semi-enclosed bedroom into a

neighboring garden. Early in the opera, the potential for reconciliation between the boy

and his mother is undermined by his inability to successfully resolve the contradiction

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9 Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges: Fantasie Lyrique en Deux Parties, trans. Katharine Wolff, Bryn Mawr, PA: Elkan-Vogel, Inc., 1932: 5.10 Steven Huebner, “Ravel’s Child: Magic and Moral Development,” in Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, eds. Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006: 70.

between his creative urges and the physical boundary imposed by architecture, which

appears here as a projection of the psychological enclosure represented by his mother.

The maternal and architectural boundaries define a threshold between internal and

external reality. The child’s eventual recognition of these boundaries as permeable

entities represents empowerment gained through the ability to move freely between

internal and external space. Moreover, through this experience the child is able to

recognize the possibility of all enclosures (including that of the ego-boundary) as two-

fold, and as a result he is able to overcome the burden of infantile anxiety.

Psychological projection and enclosure

A ballet version of the opera in a 1986 performance by the Netherlands Dance

Theater (choreographed by Jiri Kylian)11 opens with the play’s young protagonist in his

bedroom, as two cats rest in front of an active fireplace nearby. “Mama”12 enters the

room and begins to chastise the boy. Despite his best attempts to escape his mother’s

control, he is ultimately restricted by the physical boundaries of his mother’s hands, his

book, and the table. These mobile frames act collaboratively to psychologically confine

the child [fig. 1]. In reaction to this enclosure the boy once again begins to act out. The

child’s mother similarly reacts to this outburst by attempting to force the boy into

enclosure – first by straddling his body [fig. 2], then by locking him in his room.

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11 Maurice Ravel, L’enfant et les sortileges [ballet version], DVD, directed by Netherlands Dance Theater (Jiri Kylian), Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2001.12 Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges: Fantasie Lyrique en Deux Parties, trans. Katharine Wolff, Bryn Mawr, PA: Elkan-Vogel, Inc., 1932: 5.

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Figure 1. The boy is physically and psychologically enclosed by his mother’s hands, his book, and the table.

Figure 2. The boy’s mother straddles his body in an attempt to assert control over his actions.

Beyond their role in defining physical boundaries, objects within this scene reveal

the child’s experience of architecture as a psychological frame, and more specifically as

an agent of domestication. Freud describes “instincts” as the psychical forces responsible

for “the tensions caused by the needs of the id.”13 Throughout the opera, the child’s

“instinctual needs” come into conflict with such culturally imposed expectations as the

completion of his schoolwork. Just as his mother acts to counteract his instincts through

the enforcement of cultural norms, the home’s exterior walls (acting upon the house cats)

and the bricks lining the fireplace (acting upon the flames) directly challenge nature with

a set of arbitrary restrictions. At one point during his tantrum, the boy asserts his control

over the movement of the cats’ tails, a symbolic reference to the flames flickering in the

background [fig. 3]. This image represents an early example of the child’s attempts

throughout the opera to control objects by means of instinctual gestures. The boy’s

destruction continues as he runs around the room toppling furniture, ripping down

wallpaper, and tossing a caged squirrel out of an open window.

Suddenly, the furniture he had been abusing moments before comes to life.

Masculine and feminine faces emerge through the backs of two chairs [fig. 4], which now

move around the boy upon human legs. The male chair begins to dance with his female

companion as the boy looks on. Later, the chair lifts the child into a seated position

[fig. 5]. In these examples, the objects act both as screens upon which anxieties are

externalized and as boundaries enforcing conformity through enclosure, thus mediating

both projection and introjection across the child’s ego-boundary.

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13 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXIII, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74: 148.

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Figure 3. The boy attempts to bring nature under his control, moving the cats’ tails in reference to the flames that burn in the background.

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Figure 4. The boy projects his fears into furniture objects, represented onstage with human characteristics.

Figure 5. As the female chair looks on, the male chair enforces the child’s conformity to its culturally-defined function.

In addition to relative position and scale, a comparison of the manner in which a

given object is used or experienced by the boy at different points in the opera provides

insight into the child’s varying psychological condition. In many points throughout the

opera the boy’s actions are representative of the psychoanalytic notion of “ambivalence,”

in which the subject projects conflicting emotions, usually love and hatred,

simultaneously into the same object.14 In his analysis of Little Hans, Freud describes the

observation of ‘sexual symbolism’ in a five-year old subject, and dates the phenomenon

“back into the years when the child is first learning to master language.”15 In the midst of

this same pre-cultural period of development, the opera’s young protagonist predictably

experiences a wide range of ever-changing emotive states.

Early in the play the boy projects varying psychological states into a large table in

his bedroom. During his initial tantrum, he attempts to dominate the table by standing on

top of it. Later, when he is frightened, he hides underneath it. The table is then shown in

its culturally-defined role as a surface for schoolwork. Later, after his mother has locked

him inside the room, he violently overturns the table, the ultimate rejection of the

restrictions represented by the architectural object [fig. 6]. Within this sequence, the boy’s

ambivalence is expressed through his positioning relative to the tabletop surface, which

could serve as a physical representation of the ego-boundary. Considered in this light, the

child’s actions can be interpreted as a complex psychological expression of his instinctual

need for both freedom (represented through the boy’s positioning above/outside the

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14 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973: 26-9.15 Sigmund Freud, “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. & ed., Dr. A. A. Brill, New York: Random House, Inc, 1938: 594, footnote 1.

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Figure 6 (left). The boy’s ambivalence toward the table is represented by his varying position relative to the tabletop surface. In the final image, the boy overturns the table in frustration.

Figure 7 (above). Freudian diagrams show the impermeable boundary as incapable of simultaneously fulfilling the boy’s dual desires for creativity and protection.

boundary) and security (below/inside the boundary) [fig. 7; above]. Because of his

inability early in the opera to reconcile the paradox of these conflicting needs, the boy

acts to destroy the objects into which he projects his frustration. Since the tabletop

surface is impermeable, the boy’s only means of rendering it two-fold and thus

overcoming his infantile anxieties is to physically overturn it.

Later in the opera, the boy’s anxieties are once again made evident through his

interactions with architectural objects: time is personified by a grandfather clock (with a

penis-like16 pendulum) – which chastises the boy; and “[a]rithmetic”17 is personified by a

gray-haired, bearded math professor, wearing a jacket covered in computational symbols

and holding an extendable finger – allowing him, like Mama in the opera’s first scene, to

accusatorially point at the child from across the stage [fig. 8]. Through the imagery of the

former scene, Colette reveals time as yet another arbitrary, external force acting to restrict

the child’s instinctual impulses. Once again, the child’s varying experiences of the clock

and pendulum reveal his ambivalence, as the swaying of the pendulum externalizes his

own internal oscillations. In addition to variations in usage, the juxtaposition of activity

and passivity is also symptomatic of the child’s ambivalence towards his environment.18

Although at one point it appears that the boy wants to join with the clock in play, he

ultimately displays passivity, lying flat on his stomach, face toward the ground, as the

clock straddles his body [fig. 9]. Like the mother earlier in the play, the clock now forces

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16 Melanie Klein, “Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929), in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works: 1921-1945, New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975: 211.17 Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges: Fantasie Lyrique en Deux Parties, trans. Katharine Wolff, Bryn Mawr, PA: Elkan-Vogel, Inc., 1932: 11.18 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915c), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74: 128.

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Figure 8. “Arithmetic” threatens the boy by pointing from across the stage, recalling the prominence of the mother’s index finger in the opera’s first scene.

Figure 9. The passive child is straddled by the clock, symbolic of external restrictions on his instinctual urges.

the boy into subservience in order to control his innate urges. In the latter of the two

scenes, the boy – after being chased by the gray-haired man behind a chalkboard – breaks

through the board’s surface, along with several multi-colored hands, which frenetically

scribble unintelligible drawings on the board as the boy looks on. The dual actions of

these hands are indicative of the paradoxical co-existence of destruction and creation,

evident throughout the child’s progression through this pre-cultural state. More generally,

the chaos expressed in these two scenes is symptomatic of the boy’s confusion as he

attempts to confront abstract objects imposed upon him through education.

If projections represent ego-defense through the externalization of anxieties, then

the danger for the child lies in the fact that – once they have been projected – these

objects are subject to their own laws of reality.19 The same ambivalence revealed earlier

is articulated in later scenes through the boy’s projection of his mother and father into

various female and male object pairs, which dance together while the child hopelessly

attempts to fulfill his proper role within their union. The boy changes rapidly between

active and passive roles, and during various instances of subservience, the child can be

observed hiding behind architectural elements as a means of “shield[ing]”20 himself from

the external reality of what he has projected [fig. 10]. Yet because he is creating them,

such images are both internally and externally inescapable. The boy’s psychological

conflict is crystallized most succinctly, perhaps, at the conclusion of one such dance

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19 Sigmund Freud, “Extracts from the Fleiss Papers - Draft H: Paranoia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. I, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74: 207-12.20 Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges: Fantasie Lyrique en Deux Parties, trans. Katharine Wolff, Bryn Mawr, PA: Elkan-Vogel, Inc., 1932: 8.

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Figure 10. The child uses architectural elements to shield himself from projections of his anxieties.

Figure 11. A manifestation of the Oedipal complex is representative of the boy’s ambivalence toward objects of his projections.

sequence in a reference to the Oedipal complex [fig. 11; above], which Freud describes as

instinctually rooted in “a conflict of ambivalence.”21

As the opera progresses, the boy’s interactions with architectural objects become

increasingly intimidating and anxiety-producing. In reaction to these events, the boy

recedes deeper into his inner world and becomes disconnected from external reality. The

boy’s escape from his ideational enclosure is expressed architecturally as a gradual

transition from the house to a fantastic garden; the transition is represented onstage by the

successive pulling away of a series of panels [fig. 12]. However, the comfort of his

freedom is fleeting, and he continues to externalize his fears even once he is outdoors.22

As with the architectural objects inside the home, the boy’s ambivalence is once again

evident in the varying nature of his interactions with the natural objects in the garden, and

he continues to vacillate between the roles of activity and passivity. Although he is now

free from the cultural restrictions imposed by maternal (and architectural) enclosure, so

too are his psychological fantasies, which continue to intimidate and attack the boy.

This chaotic series of events is calmed only through the triumphant return of the

boy’s mother, who is now portrayed onstage as a large doll-like structure, a towering

presence more architectural than human [fig. 13]. Although the child’s first reaction is to

revert to his earlier state of anxiety, it soon becomes clear that the key to his happiness

lies in his reconciliation with his mother. In order to escape the angry animals, the boy

tries to climb beneath his mother’s skirt – an embrace of maternal protection that stands

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21 Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XX, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74: 102.22 Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges: Fantasie Lyrique en Deux Parties, trans. Katharine Wolff, Bryn Mawr, PA: Elkan-Vogel, Inc., 1932: 12.

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Figure 12. The successive pulling away of panels represents the child’s transition from interior to exterior space through the architectural threshold.

Figure 13. The mother-figure is represented in the opera’s final scene as a looming, doll-like figure, more architectural than human.

in contrast to his earlier resistance against her. However, his attempts are thwarted by the

animals, who lift away the skirt to reveal a cage structure, once again identifying the

“mother” with the physical enclosure of architecture. The boy clings to the outside

cladding of the “prison,”23 inside which is trapped the squirrel he had earlier

defenestrated. The animals gather around the cage, threatening to attack as the squirrel

pleads with the boy to leave for his own safety. The child is struck for the first time by

empathy – identifying with the hardship imposed by enclosure – and reciprocates the

squirrel’s selflessness by remaining near the cage. The boy and the squirrel physically

express this psychological connection by reaching through the threshold space of the cage

in order to embrace one another in mutual compassion [fig. 14].

In the ensuing confusion, one of the squirrel’s limbs is broken. The child uses his

mother’s scarf (which he has been carrying in his pocket) to bandage the squirrel’s

wound. Once they have witnessed this compassionate act, the animals empathize with the

child and seek to assist him the way he has assisted the squirrel:

He suffers… He has a wound… He bleeds… He has dressed the wound… We must tie up his hand… and stop the blood. The Child knows how to cure ills… What shall we do? We have wounded him… What shall we do?24

Although they had earlier mocked him for calling out for his Mama, the animals now

become intent on helping the boy. The animals tilt the cage sideways, and it is

transformed once again – into a place of refuge. He is free to leave as he pleases; but the

boy rests quietly inside the very structure with which he had previously refused to be

assimilated [fig. 15]. The animals then fully restore the mother-figure, thus facilitating the

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23 Ibid: 13.24 Ibid: 14.

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Figure 14. The boy and squirrel express mutual compassion in their embrace through the architectural threshold.

Figure 15. The boy's acceptance of maternal compassion is made possible by his recognition of protection through architectural enclosure.

boy’s maternal reconciliation via his acceptance of architectural enclosure as a source of

compassion and protection.

Melanie Klein and the sadistic impulses of children

An analysis of L’Enfant et les Sortileges by post-Freudian child psychologist

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) – based upon a second-hand account of a contemporary

production of the one-act opera in Vienna – focuses on scenes early in the performance as

indications of the boy’s instinctual rage. While Klein notes the psychological significance

of relative scale and symbolic projection (especially in regards to the boy’s interactions

with his mother),25 the main goal of her argument seems to be the framing of the play’s

narrative within the broader context of her theoretical doctrine. Klein argues that the

boy’s actions are symptomatic of what Freud terms an “early infantile situation of anxiety

or danger,” in which the child reacts to the prospect of his parent’s sexual union with

sadistic attacks [212-3]. This explanation accounts for the child’s rapid transition from

anger to fear, as he becomes frightened when his violent impulses begin to turn inward

against him.

Klein’s analysis also considers what happens once the boy has gained control over

his “lust for destruction.” Specifically, Klein argues for the developmental role of

projection, explaining that in the opera “we see what we discover in the analysis of every

child: that things represent human beings, and therefore are things of anxiety” [213]. In

Klein’s view, conflicts between the boy and household objects, later manifested outdoors

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25 Melanie Klein, “Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929), in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works: 1921-1945, New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975: 210.

with animals and other elements of nature, are ultimately rooted in psychological tension

between the child and his parents [213-4]. The protagonist is able to overcome these

impulses, Klein argues, once his development reaches the genital stage, within which the

boy is “more able […] to conquer his sadism by means of pity and sympathy.” This

process is represented in the opera when the boy cares for the wounded squirrel: “[T]he

hostile world changes into a friendly one. The child has learnt to love and believes in

love” [214]. It is no coincidence that in this moment of compassion the boy cries out for

his Mama, with whom he now reunites as a symbol of maternal protection.

In order to interpret Klein’s analysis of L’Enfant et les Sortileges, it is useful to

examine the psychoanalytic principles underlying her work. The most important of these

theoretical underpinnings is found perhaps in her theory of reparation, which leads her to

argue that “identification” – in which the child “put[s] [himself] in the place of other

people”26 – is essential to parental reconciliation. Indeed, in Klein’s view the act of

“making reparation” represents “a fundamental element in love and in all human

relationships.”27 The opera’s protagonist gains the ability to show compassion once he

identifies with the injured squirrel, and in this way he is able to achieve reconciliation not

only with his mother, but with the architectural objects into which he had been projecting

his infantile anxieties.

Also of particular interest is Klein’s advocacy for the use of the “play technique”

of child observation, in which she interprets the child’s play actions as the psychological

equivalent of free association in adults, and furthermore attempts to link each action

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26 Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation” (1937), in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works: 1921-1945, New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975: 311.27 Ibid: 313.

symbolically to its psychoanalytic root.28 Klein makes explicit the importance of play

within her overall theoretical framework in a review of Harvey Lahman and Paul Witty’s

The Psychology of Play Activities, published one year before her analysis of Ravel’s

opera.29 Criticizing the authors’ attempt to explain play in quantitative terms as

“methodological fallacy,” Klein proceeds to de-emphasize the role of human nature,

characterizing play as “the reciprocal response phase of social stimuli” [369]. It is

through this theoretical paradigm that Klein interprets the caged squirrel and the

grandfather clock’s pendulum both as “plain symbols of the penis in the mother’s body;”

a tear in the house’s wallpaper as “the father’s penis […] in the act of coitus with the

mother;” and spilled ink and a poured-out tea kettle as the child’s “device of soiling with

excrement.”30

However, as pointed out by Anna Freud, there is an important distinction to be

made between the child at play and the adult in free association: purpose.31 Although

adults are instructed to ignore logical boundaries to reach a psychological state of “free

association,” they are nonetheless consciously aware of this process, as well as its

purpose. This is not so in the case of the freely playing child, who acts outside of cultural

parameters to creatively project into objects. Furthermore, while Klein claims to

recognize the paramount importance of “social stimuli” on the child’s development, her

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28 Anna Freud, “The Role of Transference in the Analysis of Children,” in The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume I (1922-1935): Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers, New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1974: 37.29 Melanie Klein, review of The Psychology of Play Activities, by Harvey C. Lehman and Paul Witty, Psychoanalytic Review 15: 369-70.30 Melanie Klein, “Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929), In Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works: 1921-1945, New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975: 211-2.31 Anna Freud. “The Role of Transference in the Analysis of Children,” in The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume I (1922-1935): Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers, New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1974: 38.

analysis fails to fully account for the role played by the physical environment, instead

focusing narrowly on non-physical external events directly linked to various

psychosexual phases. Many architectural objects in the opera are undoubtedly symbolic

of anxiety; but Klein’s classification of every instance of the boy’s psychological

projection as an expression of anxiety seems an oversimplification. While it is certain that

in many instances the child projects his mother-figure into objects, against whom he then

turns his sadistic rage, more detailed focus upon the character of the child’s projections

reveals a more nuanced relationship between his internal and external reality.

Throughout the opera architecture is cast into the role of protector, physically and

psychologically shielding the boy while simultaneously restricting his freedom. At the

same time, the child projects into these objects fear and the desire to escape. In one scene,

personified flames escape the boundary of the fireplace and rush toward the boy.

Although he earlier attempted to control these flames, his initial reaction now is to seek

security behind the armchair [fig. 16], as if he now realizes the actual power (and

potential destructiveness) of his creative impulse. The boy reluctantly begins dancing

with the flames, eventually submitting to their dominance by lying passively on the

ground. After narrowly escaping the flames’ attacks, the boy again seeks refuge in the

chair, which is ultimately able to banish the flames back into the fireplace. In contrast to

its earlier portrayal as a symbol of anxiety, the armchair now acts to protect the boy and

restore order within the household. In addition to viewing the chair as a source of anxiety,

the child now recognizes its role as protector.

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Figure 16. The furniture is cast into the role of protector as the boy shields himself from the flames by hiding behind the armchair.

Architectural objects throughout the opera act as physical analogs to the

psychological symbol represented by the boy’s mother, conceptualized as both providing

protection and restricting instinctual free will. In her essay “Love, Guilt and

Reparation” (written eight years after her review of L’Enfant et les Sortileges), Klein

describes the complex interplay between love and hatred in children’s projections, which

she argues has its origins in infants’ concurrent feelings of compassion and destruction

towards the mother’s breast.32 Klein also explains the effects of ambivalence on the

child’s psychological development in a 1934 essay that characterizes “good” and “bad”

objects as dualistic descriptions of “imagos, which are a [f]antastically distorted picture

of the real objects upon which they are based.”33 In this description, too, disparate

psychological qualities are projected into the same object simultaneously. And yet,

despite the centrality of ambivalence in Klein’s overall work,34 the term does not appear

even once in her analysis of the opera.

The therapeutic potential of the two-fold boundary

What is missing from Klein’s analysis of L’Enfant et les Sortileges is

acknowledgment of ambivalence as vital to the child’s reparative process. The boy’s

revelatory expression of empathy (described by Klein as “identification”), which allows

him finally to overcome his sadism, does not occur by chance. Nor is it simply the result

of “advance[ment] to the genital level” [214]. Rather, it is made possible through his

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32 Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation” (1937), in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works: 1921-1945, New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975: 308.33 Melanie Klein, ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1934), in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, London: Hogarth Press, 1950: 282.34 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973: 27.

recognition and acceptance of the maternal-architectural enclosure as a two-fold

boundary. The boy develops empathy only once the permeability of the cage’s threshold

reveals psychological commonality with the wounded squirrel. By turning the cage

structure on its side, the animals and the boy act together to “overturn” a once-restrictive

enclosure. But the cage is not toppled in a fit of rage like the table earlier in the play.

Instead, it is rotated to create a new type of structure, one that provides protection without

restricting instinctual curiosity. The physical and psychological boundaries represented

by enclosure have been revealed as permeable; the boy is able to come and go as he

pleases. The child recognizes architecture’s dual roles as protector from threats and

facilitator of social interaction; this acts as a material correlate of the development of the

ego-boundary as a mediator of internal and external reality.

In contrast to the “destructive” outcomes of the young boy’s creative urges, Klein

presents an account of painter Ruth Kjär, who despite fulfilling the cultural definition of

success is afflicted with a deep depression characterized by a feeling of internal

emptiness. Kjär’s psychological void is manifested in external reality when her brother-

in-law, a professional painter, removes a loaned work from her living room wall [215].

Her depression continues until one day she spontaneously decides to fill the void by

painting it herself. Although she has no training or expertise, her amateur attempt is the

recipient of incredulous praise from her brother-in-law [216]. As with the opera’s

protagonist, Klein describes Kjär’s psychological transformation of “sadistic desire” –

rooted in the Oedipus complex – into anxiety that this impulse will be turned against her.

According to Klein, this psychological episode represents the woman’s earliest anxiety-

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situation, equivalent to castration-anxiety in boys. Visual confirmation of the mother as

real and loving, Klein argues, counteracts the introjected image of the mother as a source

of fear [217].

With this in mind, Klein characterizes a progression of Kjär’s paintings as

representing the transition from the impulse to destroy her mother to the compassionate

urge “to represent her in full possession of her strength and beauty” [218]. The blank

space on the wall provides Kjär the opportunity to fill her internal emptiness through the

psychologically constructive act of restoring her mother through the physical medium of

artistic expression. Initially, the void in Kjär’s environment is introjected as a symbol of

her inability to connect meaningfully with others. It is through her embrace of artistic

impulse that Kjär is able to overcome her anxiety and thus her depression. Because she

has already been enculturated, Kjär is not able to project psychological reality into the

external world with the same creativity as the child described in Ravel’s opera. And yet,

culturally-defined modes of expression also prove insufficient. Artistic expression is

unique in that it bypasses traditional communicative mediums, allowing for the projection

of otherwise inexpressible processes of inner psychology. The void represents for Kjär

the ultimate object of ambivalence: the artist hates the blank space before her; but she

loves the process of filling that external object with expressions of her internal reality.

Operating within a pre-cultural realm of experience, the opera’s protagonist is

able to creatively project his interior condition into objects of the external world. The

adult artist similarly projects her psychological state into a physical realm in an attempt to

connect with others in less culturally defined terms. Whether into the architectural object

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or the artistic void, these projections ultimately allow the individual to introject objects

following a state of ambivalence. In either case, the potentially destructive sadistic

impulse is channeled and becomes constructive, as the once-restrictive ego-boundary is

revealed as two-fold.

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Chapter 2

Creativity and the Permeable Boundary: Winnicott, Rank, and Neutra

Beyond its role as a medium for projection, Chapter 1 explores architecture within

the context of introjection, the phenomenon by which external objects act across the ego-

boundary to affect the child’s inner reality. An analysis of the theories of Sigmund Freud

and Melanie Klein reveals the possibility of architecture as a psychological enclosure, its

restrictive function operating in contrast to its role as a facilitator of uninhibited creative

expression. Furthermore, the ego-boundary is characterized as a two-fold threshold –

both in the sense that exchange across it occurs simultaneously in opposing directions,

and in the sense that the psychological processes involved are (often) at once loving and

hateful. The psychoanalytic term for this phenomenon is ambivalence.35 Chapter 2

considers the writings of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and Austrian

psychoanalyst Otto Rank in order to argue that the process of creative play in children is

similarly two-fold. It continues by analyzing two real-world applications of participatory

design, examining its role within the works of American psychiatrist Michael Günter and

Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra.

The therapeutic potential of creative play and introjection

The developmental importance of creativity is explored in great detail by British

psychoanalyst and pediatrician D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971), who wrote prolifically

throughout his career on the psychological behavior of children. Winnicott conceives of

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35 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973: 26.

play within the context of the child’s creative interactions with the external world,

ultimately mediated by cultural forces including the physical character of the

environment. Based on his reading of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, twentieth-century French

philosopher Roger Caillois (1913-1978) defines “play” as an activity that is free,

separate, uncertain, make believe, governed by rules, and largely non-productivist.36

Winnicott similarly locates play within a realm distinct from both psychological and

cultural reality. But while Caillois resists the notion of “productivity,” Winnicott’s

theoretical definition withstands such forms of anti-functionalism through its recognition

of creative play as representing the child’s acceptance of – and psychological adaptation

to – external reality.

Winnicott’s 1953 essay “Transitional Objects and Phenomena” marks an

important point in this line of intellectual development. Explaining their role in the

child’s psychological maturation, Winnicott describes “transitional” objects and

phenomena as experienced by the child within an

intermediate area […] between the oral erotism and true object-relationship, between primary creativity and projection of what has already been introjected, between primary unawareness of indebtedness and the acknowledgement of indebtedness.37

Acting within this space, Winnicott argues, the “transitional object” both facilitates the

child’s recognition of external reality and offers insight into his or her inner psychology.

A newly formed understanding of dependence upon the external world leads to anxiety-

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36 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001: 9-10.37 D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena – A Study of the First Not-Me Possession,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 89.

producing separation, and thus to the child’s projections into the environment as his or

her fears are externalized.

The transitional object, which Winnicott argues is rooted in the infant’s “first not-

me possession,” is regarded as part of neither internal nor external reality [89]. Rather, it

is located between the subjective and the objective, within an intermediate zone in which

both internal and external stimuli contribute to form the child’s illusory experience [90].

Often, the child’s fantasies relate to his or her functional interactions with the external

world. Winnicott describes outward manifestations of such occurrences as “transitional

phenomena” [90-1]. Despite recognizing that it exists outside the realm of his or her

omnipotence, the child asserts rights over the transitional object [91]. Because these

rights often come into conflict with the external world, the necessity of an environment

that facilitates these conditions is implicit within the Winnicottian definition.

On the other hand, the transitional object acts developmentally as a buffer

between the child’s psychological impulses and the restrictions represented by cultural

reality. Winnicott conceives of the ego-boundary not as a rigid separation between the

two realms, but rather a two-fold threshold, across which acts of creative play may flow

freely. In Klein’s interpretation of L’enfant et les sortileges, the child’s projections are

characterized strictly as destructive manifestations of the sadistic impulse. While

Winnicott, like Klein, acknowledges the child’s recognition of indebtedness as a

precursor to the anxiety inherent in separation from the mother-figure, Winnicott differs

from Klein by arguing in favor of the creative potential of this instinctual tendency.

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According to Winnicott, the child’s interactions with the transitional object are

distinct from his or her relationships to objects both prior to and following the completion

of the “journey from the purely subjective to objectivity” [92]. In the final scene of

Ravel’s opera, the boy’s introjection of external forces is represented by his acceptance of

the animals’ help in stretching Mama’s skirt over the caged scaffold. Thus the mother-

figure, having survived his repeated attacks, is physically and psychologically re-

constructed through the boy’s effective use of externally-defined resources. Winnicottian

theory similarly accounts for the importance of the child’s ambivalent projections: The

ability to survive varying expressions of love and hatred is central to the transitional

object’s role within the child’s development [91]. These observations relate to Winnicott’s

notion of the “good enough ‘mother’” as the facilitator of the infant’s “capacity to

experience a relationship to external reality.”38 The “good enough” mother is conceived

of, and applied therapeutically, by Winnicott as an alternative to the “ideal” mother, who

constantly attempts – and fails – to be perfect in the child’s eyes. This maturational

process begins when the mother’s contribution to the illusory experience “overlap[s]”

with the child’s creative urge [95] [fig. 17].

It is through the child’s recognition of his or her first not-me possession,

Winnicott explains, that “a shape is given to the area of illusion” [fig. 18], thereby

allowing the child to similarly reconcile his or her internal condition with external reality.

This “shape” is represented in the material world by a physical object. Existing within “a

neutral area of experience which will not be challenged” [95] the transitional object

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38 Ibid: 94.

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Figure 17 (left). Illusory experiences mediate interactions between mother and infant during early stages of psychological development.

Figure 18 (right). Transitional objects provide a physical medium for the child's illusory experience, thus facilitating his or her recognition of external reality.

acts to “wean” the child from dependence through a dual process of “illusion” and

“disillusionment” in order to initiate the “necessary […] relationship between the child

and the world” [95-6]. Whereas Klein’s interpretation of the opera considers the

architectural environment insofar as it relates to objects of the child’s psychological

projection, Winnicott argues for the importance of an environment that encourages the

child’s creative play. Klein describes the boy’s sadistic attacks as inevitable, non-

functional by-products of his psychosexual maturation, symptoms of neuroses to be

addressed and overcome retroactively through culturally-defined interventions.

Winnicottian theory, by contrast, recognizes the therapeutic potential inherent within this

destructiveness, and advocates for an environmental design that properly facilitates these

acts as constructive contributions to the child’s psychological development.

Winnicott argues explicitly for the importance of the physical and psychological

features of external reality in a 1960 essay on the “holding environment.”39 After relating

infantile-anxiety to the “threat of annihilation,” Winnicott describes within the child

alternative states of “being” and “reacting” (to the threat). According to Winnicott

“reacting interrupts being and [thus] annihilates.” In this way, Winnicott demonstrates

that external reality is capable of facilitating within the child either “being” or

annihilation.”40 The character of the environment is important because

[u]nder [favorable] conditions the infant establishes a continuity of existence and then begins to develop the sophistications which make it possible for impingements to be gathered into the area of omnipotence.41

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39 D. W. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” (1960), in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, Madison, CT: International Universities Press, Inc., 1987: 47.40 Ibid.41 Ibid.

Ideally, the subject’s environment – echoing the original subject-object relationship

between infant and mother – minimizes threats in order to facilitate within the child “a

continuity of existence” that allows for psychological maturation, culminating with the

possibility of introjection.

Existing as a threat-free tabula rasa, the artistic medium fulfills this

environmental requirement. As demonstrated by Klein’s description of Kjär, creative

expression may affect not only exterior space, but also the artist’s internal psychology. To

the extent that it provides a neutral object into which to freely project inner processes, the

artistic medium is able to “survive” (because it does not “retaliate” against) the subject’s

destructive urges. Through the act of creative expression, the artist “destroys” the

medium through the externalization of his or her psychological reality. The usefulness of

psychoanalytic therapy, Winnicott argues, relies on a similar notion of the “positive value

of destructiveness,”42 embedded in the subject’s ability to recognize the objective

existence of the analyst. By virtue of this recognition the subject is able to allow the

psychotherapeutic process – which is governed by a set of rules existing outside the

subject’s omnipotence – to become part of his or her psychological feedback mechanism.

This characterization of the environment has vast implications on the role of

architecture as an agent in the child’s psychological development. Where Freud de-

emphasizes the importance of environmental considerations, Winnicott argues that the

environment profoundly affects its users’ unconscious functioning. By recognizing both

physical and psychological experiences as “subliminal mode[s] of perception,”

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42 D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena – A Study of the First Not-Me Possession,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 96.

architectural historian and theorist Sylvia Lavin explains, Winnicott renders the two

“literally isomorphic.”43 Because of the two-fold nature of the ego-boundary, physical

and psychological reality play equally important roles in characterizing the child’s

environment during this stage of development.

This emphasis on the emotive character of the physical environment reverberated

through architectural discourse in the mid-twentieth century. Of particular interest are the

works of Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970), whose personal and

professional interests in psychoanalytic theory are well-documented.44 Like Winnicott,

Neutra acknowledges the developmental importance of the designer’s consideration of

the psychological perspective:

We must get over the notion that design deals only with external objects. Once we recognize that a product of upper brain called design affects ever-greater portions of the innermost human being, related responsibilities loom before us.45

The recognition by Neutra and other environmentalist architects of the psychological role

played by architecture is significant, as it introduced the possibility that developments in

psychoanalytic thought could be extended physically into the built world.

From object-relating to object-usage

In a later extension of his explorations, Winnicott argues in a 1967 essay that

interactions with the transitional object demonstrate the child’s “first experience of play.”

The efficacy of this play, Winnicott explains, is dependent upon the child’s ability to

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43 Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004: 29.44 Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004: 25-32.45 Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984: 318.

interact freely with the object, unchallenged regarding its origin and ignorant of its

cultural function. The transitional object serves an essential role within the process by

which the child’s experience of the “mother” is transformed from internal, “conceived of”

truth into external, “perceived” reality. After this process of “separation” is completed the

child reconciles with his mother-figure through the “union” that is represented by the

child’s effective use of the object within the context of shared reality [369].

While theorists such as Klein have focused almost exclusively on the analysis of

acts representing the child’s instinctual urge to destroy, Winnicott argues for the

psychological importance of equivalent phenomena that occur outside of anxiety-

situations. He refers to such “non-climactic experiences” as acts of “playing” [370]. Both

Klein and Winnicott characterize such acts as attempts by the child to mediate internal

and external reality. However, Klein’s prerequisite of anxiety limits her analysis to

destructive acts, which occur when the child’s environment has not properly facilitated

his or her illusory experience. Winnicott expands on Kleinian theory by considering the

importance of constructive play, which he argues can occur only within a properly

designed environment.

Winnicott more fully develops this theoretical framework in the 1969 essay “The

Use of the Object,” published two years before his death. Winnicott begins his argument

by explicitly discriminating between the concepts of “object-relating” and “object-

usage.”46 In the former phenomenon, the subject’s relationship to the object is described

as “a bundle of projections” [712] borne of the subject’s inner psychological processes.

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46 D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969): 711.

As demonstrated in Klein’s interpretation of Ravel’s opera, object-relating is

characterized by the child’s ever-evolving psychological reality projected into objects of

the external world. According to Winnicott, the transition from this state to that of object-

usage occurs only once the child has located the object “outside the area of [his or her]

omnipotent control,” thereby recognizing it “as an external phenomenon […] an entity in

its own right” belonging to “shared” reality [713-4]. The success of this process relies

upon the object’s ability to survive the child’s attempts to destroy it.47 If the environment

is able to resist the child’s attacks during the stage of object-relating, destructive urges

may be channeled into acts of creative expression as the child develops the ability to use

objects, which are now able to provide psychological feedback through introjection.

The theoretical importance of Winnicott’s emphasis on this transition could be

illustrated by its tentative absorption into the theories of later writers, including Neutra,

who similarly describes his aspirations to design objects that are able to “change to

usables, to life tools.”48 It also offers a compelling alternative to less dynamic

frameworks such as Klein’s. In her interpretation of L’enfant et les Sortileges, Klein

describes the boy as overcoming his sadism by virtue of his transition from the oral to the

genital phase of psychosexual development. However, Winnicott’s writings suggest that

the boy is able to reconcile with his mother – and therefore overcome his neuroses – in

part because the architectural objects that make up his environment survive his attacks.

By virtue of the child’s innate urges (which are manifested in the child’s attempts to

destroy through fantasy), objects become externalized, a two-fold process in which the

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47 Ibid: 713.48 Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984: 260.

possibility of object-usage is revealed to the child for the first time: It is not just that the

child destroys the object because it exists outside his or her omnipotence, but equally that

this process of destruction itself places the object in external reality. In this manner “the

object develops its own autonomy and life, and (if it survives) contributes into the

subject, according to its own properties.”49 The phenomenon of introjection is made

possible through the child’s recognition of the object as an entity whose existence is

externally governed.

The far-reaching implications of this thesis are made especially salient by

Winnicott’s characterization of the psychoanalyst as object: He describes the patient’s

development of the capacity “to place the analyst outside the area of subjective

phenomena” as the principal goal of psychological therapy [711]. Like that of the object,

the analyst’s “survival” is made possible through the ability to avoid retaliation against

the patient’s acts of destruction. At the completion of each phase of this transference the

psychoanalyst is rewarded with love, and it is only through successive fantasies of

destruction and love that the analyst – or, more generally, the object – can be fully

externalized and therefore effectively “used” [714]. Thus the analyst’s role is to facilitate

his or her own destruction at the hands of the analysand, in order that the subject may

effectively use the analyst as an externally-defined object. Architecture functions within

an analogously therapeutic role when it facilitates the child’s creative expression. As a

result of this maturation, the analyst – or object – becomes a part of shared reality which,

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49 D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969): 713.

beyond simply reflecting back into the patient his or her own internal processes, functions

as an external entity that can provide psychological feedback through introjection [715].

Winnicott’s squiggle technique

Winnicott’s “squiggle technique” for psychoanalytic interviews with children –

explored in great detail by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Michael Günter50 – offers a

particularly intriguing example of the therapeutic potential of artistic expression. The

squiggle technique begins with the interviewer drawing an amorphous squiggle, which –

having been inserted into the child’s intermediate reality – is completed by his or her act

of creative expression. The child then draws a squiggle that is completed by the

interviewer. This artistic dialog produces various images that can then be discussed with

the child, allowing communication about psychological processes that he or she might be

otherwise unable to express. In an essay describing use of the squiggle technique to

interview children suffering from life threatening illness, Günter describes the method as

allowing the therapist to “decisively facilitate” access to the child’s inner psychology “by

inserting a medium as a type of buffer.”51 Because it is “a more preverbal, universal

language,” artistic expression is able to “cut through” the culturally-defined “differences”

that normally inhibit communication.52 Most importantly, collaborative creation dissolves

the traditional barrier between analyst and analysand, “provid[ing] the child with a

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50 Michael Günter, Playing the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Interviews with Children Using Winnicott’s Squiggle Technique, London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2007: 1-39.51 Michael Günter, “Art Therapy as an Intervention to Stabilize the Defenses of Children Undergoing Bone Marrow Transplantation,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 27-1 (2000): 5.52 Brett Kahr, “Foreword,” in Günter, Michael, Playing the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Interviews with Children Using Winnicott’s Squiggle Technique, London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2007: xv.

wonderful means of engaging in contact with the psychotherapist or doctor who may be

perceived at first as quite a scary figure.”53

The architectural analog to this process is achieved through the effective use of

participatory design, which similarly seeks to bridge the professional divide between

architect and client. According to Winnicott, psychoanalytic therapy ultimately consists

of “two people playing together.”54 The squiggle technique facilitates playful interaction

by de-emphasizing the culturally-defined boundary that exists between therapist and

patient and redirecting analysis at an inanimate third party (the drawing). In the same

way, participatory design attempts to facilitate communication in order to constructively

translate the psychological reality of the client into the architect’s realm of expertise. A

predictably large portion of Neutra’s design theory is centered around his client

relationships. By demonstrating the desire to understand his users’ needs and

repositioning this interaction within the context of cooperative creation,55 Neutra

endeavors to gain insight into each user’s internal reality, better positioning himself to

design an environment that both minimizes threats and encourages creative exploration.

In both the squiggle technique and participatory architectural design, collaborative

expression is achieved through a partial overlapping of the child’s (or the client’s) with

the therapist’s (or the architect’s) intermediate reality. Once they have found common

ground in a realm of pre-cultural expression, professional barriers lose meaning as a more

primitive and expressive communicative form is embraced. In the case of the squiggle

technique, the child realizes the possibility of constructive projection into the external

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53 Ibid.54 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1971: 38.55 Ibid: 50.

world. Moreover, the child’s acceptance of the therapist’s creations into his or her

intermediate realm represents a successful example of introjection. Here creativity is

shown as inspiring ambivalence, acting along the ego-boundary as a two-fold

mechanism. The complexity of the child’s fantasies is revealed through observation of the

connections he or she draws between externally-observed symbols and internally-

assigned meanings. For example, Fabian (age 12) responds to Günter’s “earth-house with

doors and windows […] representing a stable mother-identification” with a fleeting car,

indicating “that he was hesitant and on the defensive”56 [fig. 19].

In a later phase of his research, Günter combines Winnicott’s squiggle technique

with a written questionnaire. In his analysis of the data from both interview methods

Günter concludes that “the children achieved their astonishing adaptation […] by dealing

with the experience on at least two levels.” Although the children in the study often

effectively coped with their anxieties at a conscious level, many continued to struggle

unconsciously with the stress imposed by the threat of their medical conditions. Günter

explains that “[i]n normal life these children still could not talk about these problems,

because a conscious discussion of them would have jeopardized [their] psychosocial

adaptation[s]” [189]. In contrast, the squiggle interview technique facilitates a

collaborative illusory experience within which the child’s fears can be projected into a

non-threatening artistic medium.

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56 Michael Günter, Playing the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Interviews with Children Using Winnicott’s Squiggle Technique, London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2007: 45.

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Figure 19. The complexity of the interactions between the child's internal and external worlds is made apparent in squiggle drawings, which reveal pre-cultural connections between his or her psychology and objects in physical reality.

The “Trauma of Birth” and the role of aesthetic pleasure

In order to properly contextualize Winnicott’s intellectual development, it is

useful to consider the writings of Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884-1939).

Although Rank began his studies under the tutelage of Freud, his later work represents an

important philosophical split from his former teacher – shared by both Klein and

Winnicott – grounded in the belief that the infant enters into a subject-object relationship

with the mother immediately after separation from the womb. In this view, the birth

process represents the first in a series of separations that characterize the child’s various

stages of psychosexual development.57

Rank’s writings represent a major conceptual shift in psychoanalytic theory, made

explicit by his 1927 critique of Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety:

[I]t is certain that the newborn infant loses something as soon as it is born, indeed even as soon as birth begins – something that we can express in our language in hardly any other way than the loss of an object or, if one wants to be more precise, the loss of a milieu. The characteristic quality of the birth act is that it is a transitional phenomenon […], and that very fact may determine its traumatic character.58

Rank’s description of birth as the loss of not only an object, but a “milieu,” aligns with

the importance placed by Winnicott on a “sheltering environment” facilitated by the

mother-figure. Furthermore, Rank describes birth as a “transitional phenomenon” and

links this attribute to its “traumatic character,” supporting Winnicott’s characterization of

transitional objects and phenomena as agents of psychological maturation.59

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57 Peter L. Rudnytsky, The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991: 57.58 Otto Rank, “Review of S. Freud, Hemmung, Symptom und Angst (Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety) (1927),” Mental Hygiene 11: 183.59 Peter L. Rudnytsky, The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991: 57.

The 1932 publication Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development

represents the capstone of Rank’s intellectual progress on the issues of play, creativity,

and artistic expression. In a chapter entitled “The Play-Impulse and Aesthetic Pleasure,”

Rank characterizes artistic success as the simultaneous achievement of both “dynamic

expression” within the art’s creator and “aesthetic enjoyment” within its recipient.60

Artistic acts, Rank argues, are rooted in the “individual need for expression,” and

specifically in the “personal urge to immortalization” [93]. In this view, common to all

artists – regardless of historical or cultural context – is the desire “to prove the existence

of the soul by concretizing it,” a process achieved through the external objectification of

the artist’s subjective “unreality” [96].

Like Winnicott, Rank recognizes both the universality and the developmental

necessity of the projection of internal reality into objects of the external world. Rank

differs from Winnicott, however, in his characterization of the role played by “aesthetic

appeal.” Within a given culture, Rank argues, aesthetic appeal functions as a common

point of reference, allowing the artist to overcome his or her infantile-anxiety by securing

“society’s sanction” to symbolically express his or her immortality-seeking inner

psychology [101]. While Winnicott similarly describes the environment as a facilitator of

creative construction, he departs from Rank by framing this expression’s appeal as

transgressing culturally-defined parameters such as aesthetics.

Rank describes both play and artistic expression as taking place within a

collective “plane of illusion” [106]. Once the artistic object has been “released” [91],

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60 Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932: 91.

others with access to the illusory plane (i.e., cultural peers) may introject the creative

expression, thus connecting spiritually to the artist in a process of “simultaneous

dissolution of […] individuality” [110]. Because the object now exists independent of its

creator, this process of represents the possibility of eternalization of the artist’s soul. This

constructive projection functions, Rank argues, as a mechanism of defense against the

artist’s fear of death. Winnicott similarly conceives of the creative impulse as rooted in

separation anxiety, but deviates from Rank by arguing for its significance within the

child’s pre-cultural development.

Despite his characterization of Rank as “the earliest proponent and intellectual

historian of objects relations theory”61 – thus laying the groundwork for the writings of

many influential post-Freudian theorists – Rudnytsky ultimately criticizes what he

describes as “the flaccidity of Rank’s antipsychoanalytic final period” [69]. Although

they share common theoretical roots, the positions of Rank and Winnicott in respect to

artistic expression are characterized more properly by their differences than their

similarities [65]. While Winnicott argues for the constructive value of childhood play,

Rank cynically characterizes such explorations as “useless for the explanation of creative

art.”62 By conceptualizing all action as rooted in “the fear of death and the urge for

immortality,” Rudnytsky argues, Rank is forced in the defense of “a fuzzy brand of

existentialism” to all but abandon his previous interests in the psychological significance

of childhood experiences of separation and anxiety.63

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61 Peter L. Rudnytsky, The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991: 61.62 Otto Rank, Art and Artist, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932: 324.63 Peter L. Rudnytsky, The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991: 68.

Indeed, in nearly direct opposition to Freud, Rank’s later writings dismiss the

functional potential of childhood experience within the context of creative expression.

Winnicottian theory, by contrast, reveals a more open perspective. The importance placed

by Winnicott on the environment as a facilitator of constructive development – as well as

his conception of the transitional object’s role in psychological maturation –

acknowledges Rank’s observations regarding the importance of cultural norms, including

aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, Winnicott recognizes the therapeutic potential of the

child’s naïve projections, as well as object-usage and introjection as means of facilitating

his or her psychological transformation.

Richard Neutra and the permeable architectural boundary

Despite a relative lack of consensus among post-Freudian theorists on a range of

theoretical issues, psychoanalysis grew into an increasingly powerful force in the early-

to mid-twentieth century, and soon began to affect profoundly other mediums of cultural

expression, including architectural design. In response to the development of object-

relations theory and the importance it placed upon the psychological character of built

space, environment-centered design – described in 1962 by Victor Gruen as necessary “if

architecture is ever to become meaningful again”64 – became increasingly prevalent.

Along these lines, the works of Austrian-American Richard Neutra sought to transform

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64 Victor Gruen, “Environmental Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education (1947-1974) 17-3 (December 1962): 97.

modernism’s “abstract void” into an “affective environment” through consideration of the

emotive character of designed spaces.65

Despite a personal relationship with Freud during his years in Vienna, Neutra’s

architectural designs were influenced in large part by his interpretation of Rankian theory,

particularly Rank’s notion of the trauma of birth [51]. In one of the most innovative of his

design strategies, Neutra employs “spider-leg outrigging,” in which “normally stabilizing

architectural elements” such as structural beams are placed “indeterminably inside and

outside at the same time” [fig. 20]. In addition to obscuring the structure’s edges, Lavin

explains that in the case of the Rourke House (1949)

the spider legs create what might be called an intermediary zone, a kind of birth canal that mediates the passage from inside to outside. Rank was especially interested in the fear created by bugs and insects in small children, theorizing that the insect’s ability to crawl into the ground reminded children of their incapacity to return to the womb. Neutra’s spider legs minimize this anxiety by functioning as architectural umbilical cords.66

In this example, Neutra responds to the infantile anxiety represented by the trauma of

birth with an architectural design meant to counteract this fear. Spider-leg outrigging

physically and psychologically mediates the boundary between the building’s interior and

exterior, minimizing separation anxiety by creating a space that couples creative freedom

with maternal safety. Such a design reveals Neutra’s understanding of architecture as a

“social art […] an instrument of human fate” that “not only caters to requirement but also

shapes and conditions our responses.”67 While his buildings may be rooted theoretically

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65 Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004: 3.66 Ibid: 63-4.67 Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984: 314.

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Figure 20. Spider-leg outrigging mediates the architectural transition between internal and external space at Neutra's Rourke House (1949).

in Rank’s writings, the importance placed by Neutra on the design of environments that

are simultaneously protective and empowering aligns his works with Winnicottian theory.

Based in part on his own childhood recognition of the psychological significance

of environmental variables including “space, texture, light, and shade,”68 Neutra argues

for the necessity of considerations such as relative scale [25], color [180-1], lighting

[185], and transparency [187] in architectural design. Neutra’s intellectual development

was also shaped by interactions with his children, including his second son Dion, who

joined his professional practice in the 1940s.69 In a speech paying tribute to his father on

the thirtieth anniversary of his death, Dion reflects upon his attempts to extend their

shared interests in creativity and human connectedness within the context of modern

technological development.70

Neutra’s relationship with his family is representative of his broader concerns

with community, made manifest in larger commissions – including school design,

described by architectural historian Thomas Hines as his primary interest within the

public sphere71 – in which Neutra was forced “to confront the related social and political

issues of the national and international scene” [161]. As with spider-leg outrigging later

in his career, many features of Neutra’s addition to the Corona Avenue School in Los

Angeles (1935) address the transition between interior and exterior space:

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68 Ibid: 26.69 Dion Neutra, “The Neutra Genius: Innovations & Vision,” Modernism 1-3 (December 1998), reprinted in Dion and Richard Neutra Architecture, http://www.neutra.org/modern.html (accessed 2 April 2009).70 Dion Neutra, “Thirty Years: A Paen to Richard Neutra at the First VDL Open House of the 21st Century” (April 16, 2000), in Dion and Richard Neutra Architecture, http://www.neutra.org/tribute.html (accessed 2 April 2009).71 Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 161.

Bilateral ventilation and lighting came from high clerestory windows on the east above the open-porch, outdoor hallway and from the sliding glass walls on the west that opened to the garden patios. Hedges divided each outdoor class space from its neighbors. Shade trees, adjustable awnings, and a six-foot roof slab overhang protected the classrooms from the sun and the elements. Movable chairs and desks, easily portable between indoors and out, replaced the screwed-down furniture of yore. [164]

These features reveal Neutra’s design theory as potentially corresponding to the

Winnicottian definition of the “holding environment.” Instances of psychological

restriction – necessitated by cultural norms such as privacy, as well as biological needs

such as protection from natural elements – are mitigated in several ways. Many of the

enclosures are retractable, allowing the user to choose freely between protection and

exposure. Similarly, the student is empowered to move furniture between interior and

exterior space, minimizing the importance of culturally-defined use. Hedges along the

classrooms’ borders function as permeable boundaries, offering privacy while

encouraging community interaction. Enhanced ventilation and strategic window

placement allow the built spaces to benefit from natural elements, contributing to the

students’ establishment of an introjective relationship to external reality.

As with Winnicott, Neutra’s professional development is informed both by theory

(through his writings) and practice (as an architect). In his most influential work, Survival

Through Design (1954), Neutra lays out much of the basis of what would later be called

environmental psychology, a design movement that defines architectural space in terms

of “the transactions and interrelationships of human experiences and actions with

pertinent aspects of the socio-physical surroundings.”72 A guiding principle in many of

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72 David V. Canter and Kenneth H. Craik, “Environmental Psychology,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 1 (1981): 2.

Neutra’s designs is the concept of “empathy,” which he defines as “a far reaching

physiological functioning […] ‘as if’ one were that other individual.”73 For Neutra, this

empathy characterizes on the one hand the relationship between the building and its user,

and on the other hand the interaction between the designer and his or her client [39].

Neutra’s later writings similarly serve to expose the theoretical basis for his

school designs. Lamenting the social predominance of considerations such as economic

concerns, which he deemed irrelevant to the child, Neutra describes the classroom within

the context of each student’s individual experience.74 He also characterizes the

permeability of the architectural boundary as essential to the design of a facilitating

environment, emphasizing the importance of an appropriate “visual and physical rapport”

between interior and exterior space. This “rapport” is in fact also psychological, relating

to Winnicott’s description of the child’s illusory experience. For example, Neutra writes

of transparency in his school designs as “help[ing] to ease [the] transition back into the

classroom from summer vacation.” By affording students “the comfort of seeing the

outdoors” [59], Neutra explains, children are allowed to reflect constructively while

fulfilling their culturally-defined obligation to attend school.

Neutra’s designs can be considered as physical manifestations of contemporary

developments in psychoanalytic theory, particularly the works of Otto Rank and D. W.

Winnicott. By recognizing the trauma of birth as the first in a series of anxiety-producing

events, Neutra accounts for the user’s ambivalence in order to encourage psychological

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73 Richard Neutra, “Empathy-Infeeling” (unpublished), in Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004: 34.74 Richard Neutra, “Drawing on our Inter-individuality,” in Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, ed. William Marlin, Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1989: 57.

feedback through introjection, thus aspiring to the Winnicottian ideal of constructively

channeling the sadistic impulse. Like Günter in his application of the squiggle interview

technique, Neutra champions participatory design as a means of combining empathy and

professional expertise in order to create psychologically advantageous environments.

Despite their shared psychoanalytic dispositions, however, Neutra’s real-world

implementation of participatory design differs profoundly from Günter’s. Within the

context of the squiggle interview technique, Günter empowers the child to create an

object that functions therapeutically within the course of his or her own psychological

development. Neutra also works together with his clients during the design phase, but

their psychological input is ultimately filtered through his own set of design principles

before the idea is translated into building form. While Neutra certainly goes beyond most

contemporary architects in his consideration of the user’s psychological perspective, the

resulting built object is decidedly his own creation. Especially in his larger projects,

Neutra relies heavily upon a limited repertory of forms. Although much of his

architecture focuses upon the psychological importance of the permeable boundary,

within the context of his design process the professional threshold between architect and

client, adult and child is never fully dissolved. The threshold is indeed permeable, but

never as transparent as one of Neutra’s glass corners.

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Chapter 3

Enculturation and the Architectural Threshold: Piaget and Van Eyck

Through consideration of the theories of post-Freudian psychoanalysts D. W.

Winnicott and Otto Rank, Chapter 2 argues for the importance of ambivalence and

introjection within an environment designed to facilitate psychological growth.

According to Winnicott, an ideal environment minimizes threats while providing an

external reality that overlaps (at least partially) with the child’s destructive-creative

impulse. In Winnicott’s view, the integrity of the child’s illusory experience is maintained

by his or her ability to effectively project inner reality into objects belonging to the

outside world. By resisting retaliation, transitional objects become part of the child’s

external reality, and thus are able to provide psychological feedback through introjection.

In addition, Chapter 2 explores the participatory design practices of psychiatrist Michael

Günter and environmentalist architect Richard Neutra as methods of facilitating

communication by ostensibly de-emphasizing culturally-defined barriers.

Chapter 3 extends these findings by considering the writings of Swiss philosopher

and natural scientist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), including the architectural ramifications of

the process of enculturation that occurs during early stages of the child’s psychological

development. It concludes by examining the potential of child-centered planning at the

urban scale, analyzing contemporary innovations in playground design by Dutch architect

Aldo van Eyck to explore in more depth the psychological implications of the permeable

architectural threshold.

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The ego-boundary as a two-fold threshold

Urban theorist Mario Gandelsonas has described the development of urban theory

in the mid-twentieth century in terms of a subject-object relationship between the

architect and city,75 characterized by the projection of idealized “urban fantasies” into the

developing grid, culturally mandated through the “unifying impulse” of a desire for a

democratized post-war society [48]. Yet despite the widespread influence of

psychoanalytic theory during this period, the acceptance of its principles into the

framework of modern planning required the intellectual support of continued scientific

investigation. Whereas Neutra advances the scientific basis for psychoanalytic design by

focusing specifically on the psychological role of the environment, the writings of Jean

Piaget serve more generally to elucidate the cultural processes underlying the formation

of the child’s conceptions of external reality. Piaget accounts for the significance of

spatial experience within the overall process of the child’s enculturation, linking spatial

conception with other psychological adaptations, including the development of language.

Indeed, architectural historian Myra Levick has argued that the “transition from

pre-logical to logical thinking” described in Piaget’s writings “is parallel to the

psychoanalytic concept of the transition from primary process to secondary process

thinking.”76 In other words, Piaget’s description of the child’s maturation from pre-

cultural to culturally-defined spatial experience corresponds closely with the child’s

development of the ability to therapeutically introject externally-defined objects.

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75 Mario Gandelsonas, X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999: 59.76 Myra F. Levick, They Could Not Talk and So They Drew: Children’s Styles of Coping and Thinking, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1983: 40.

Therefore, an understanding of this process is essential in the planning and design of

environments meant to fulfill the Winnicottian standard for facilitating the child’s

psychological development. Moreover, theorist Stanley Greenspan has characterized

Piagetian theory as the external (and conscious) analog to the psychoanalytic description

of the internal (and unconscious) processes governing child behavior,77 further

reinforcing the importance of creativity as an expression of the child’s inner psychology,

acting across the ego-boundary to mediate his or her relationship with the external world.

Piaget lays the groundwork for such theoretical exploration in The Child’s

Conception of the World (1926), which endeavors to track the natural progression of the

child’s understanding of external reality through his or her psychological development.78

Like Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists, Piaget characterizes the child’s early

inability to discriminate between internal and external reality as resulting in his or her

conception of nonliving objects as possessing characteristics of human life and

consciousness, a phenomenon he describes as “animism” [207]. Moreover, Piaget

describes “projection” and “introjection” as psychologically symptomatic of the

“biological reality” of the two-fold process of “assimilation of the environment by the

organism and the transformation of the organism into a function of the environment.”

Although his arguments are framed in terms decidedly more scientific than Winnicott’s,

Piaget similarly contends that the child’s environment, as well as the processes that

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77 Stanley I. Greenspan, Intelligence and Adaptation: An Integration of Psychoanalytic and Piagetian Developmental Psychology, New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1979.78 Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World (1926), trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson, Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1979: 1.

mediate psychological and cultural reality, are essential components in both identity

formation and adaptation to the external world [241-2].

Piaget extends this argument further into the realm of architectural design with

The Child’s Conception of Space (1948), which argues that even simple geometric

relationships are not inherent properties of perception, but instead products of

conditioning during critical periods of development.79 According to Piaget, spatial

concepts emerge in order of evolutionary importance, developing in parallel to other

forms of cultural conditioning through a process of “gradual construction.”80 Piaget

describes this development as occurring in three stages: practical, subjective, and

objective.81 In the practical phase of development, the child has yet to recognize the ego-

boundary, and so does not differentiate between self (subject) and other (object). In the

subjective (or egocentric) phase, the child recognizes external objects, but

overemphasizes his role as their “creator and controller” [118]. (The psychological

importance of this phase – in which the ego-boundary is recognized by the child but

remains permeable – is made evident, for example, in L’Enfant et les Sortileges.) Finally,

the objective phase is marked by the child’s recognition of the self as one of many objects

located in external reality, thus the process of enculturation marked by the “differentiation

of self and environment” is completed [118].

During this development the child also begins to coordinate vision with grasping

as a means of testing his or her internal processes against the externally-defined

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79 Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child’s Conception of Space (1948), trans. F. J. Langdon and J. L. Lunzer, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967: 6.80 Ibid.81 Linda P. Acredolo, “Coordinating Perspectives on Infant Spatial Orientation,” in The Development of Spatial Cognition, ed. Robert Cohen, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1985: 115.

conditions of outer reality. Once the child’s spatial conceptions have fully developed, his

or her visual perceptions are translated into the symbolic realm that dominates cultural

reality: “Hence from being purely perceptual, space has become partly

representational.”82 This process is described more broadly as a transition from

topological to projective and Euclidean spatial experience [418].

In addition to the concepts of proximity, separation, and order, Piaget describes

topological spatial experience as prominently defined by “surrounding” [104]. In order to

study the development of the child’s experience of this important spatial concept, Piaget

observes the child’s understanding of knots, which are unique in that they are both taught

to the child at an early age, and – by virtue of their geometry – “do not form visual or

sensori-motor [G]estalten” within the child’s internal reality. Instead, Piaget explains, the

child gradually develops his or her understanding of knots, and this development can be

observed in changes over time in the child’s comprehension of the knot’s form [105].

Although the child experiences enclosure in three dimensions during early stages

of development, an understanding of knots is more difficult because it requires the ability

to transition from one to three dimensions within the context of a single object [111]. In

addition, in order to properly comprehend the knot’s form the child must fully internalize

the action of knot-tying. Even once the child is able to successfully tie a knot, he or she is

initially unable to discriminate between knots and open loops through visual investigation

alone [113]. During these early stages of development, the child relies upon vision within

the two-dimensional perceptual plane – as opposed to potential action within the three-

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82 Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child’s Conception of Space (1948), trans. F. J. Langdon and J. L. Lunzer, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967: 12-3.

dimensional conceptual plane – in his or her interpretation of the knot’s form [118]. An

ability to understand as the same object a knot at varying tautness demonstrates the

child’s “motor anticipation” of the potential action of loosening or tightening the knot,

representing an important step in his or her transition from a perceptual to a conceptual

understanding of enclosure [120]. According to Piaget, this development is predicated

upon “a dynamic equilibrium in the form of reversible operations of thought,” made

possible by “ideas that extend beyond perceptual patterns to embrace imaginary

anticipations and reconstructions, potential actions depicted in imagination” [120].

Many features of Piaget’s description of topological spatial experience –

particularly his characterization of enclosure – align closely with Winnicott’s

developmental framework. In addition to reiterating the emphasis placed by Winnicott on

the design of the physical environment, Piagetian theory recalls the Winnicottian notions

of transitional objects and phenomena by explaining the child’s grasping as an early

attempt to establish a relationship with the external world. Similarly, Piaget’s description

of the child’s overemphasis on his or her role as “creator and controller” during the

egocentric phase corresponds with Winnicott’s explanation of the child’s interactions with

his or her first “not-me” object. Furthermore, Piaget defines the child’s passage into the

objective phase of development – which is analogous to the transition from object-

relating to object-usage in Winnicottian theory – as marked by the recognition of objects

as culturally functional and existing within external reality.

In the practical phase of development, the infant is unable to recognize the ego-

boundary as separating internal and external reality. By the time he or she has reached the

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objective phase of development, the child has undergone a process of enculturation that

has shaped the relationship between his or her psychological and physical realms. The

point of entry for consideration of the child’s pre-cultural spatial experience for Piaget is

the subjective phase, in which – by virtue of the child’s egocentricity – the ego-boundary

is characterized as a two-fold threshold, across which both projection and introjection

may freely occur.

Both Piaget and Winnicott place great importance within the child’s development

upon his or her recognition of the ego-boundary as the proper frame of reference from

which to mediate interactions between internal and external reality. Piaget’s description

of the child’s conceptual understanding of knots as made possible through his or her

simultaneous responses to internal and external stimuli recalls Winnicott’s emphasis on

the illusory plane as necessary within the child’s development of a relationship to the

outside world. Indeed, Piaget later defines play as crucial within the child’s assimilation

to the social and objective properties of the external environment.83 Along with language,

Piaget argues, play serves a fundamental function within the symbolic “interiorization” of

the child’s actions,84 facilitating meaningful interaction (“praxis”) within the context of

his or her external environment [63].

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83 Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, trans. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson, London: Routledge, 1999: 87.84 Jean Piaget, “Child Praxis,” in The Child & Reality: Problems of Genetic Psychology, trans. Arnold Rosin, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973: 74.

From perceptual to conceptual reality

Within his developmental framework, Piaget describes three types of spatial

experience: topological, projective, and Euclidean. As described above, topological space

relies on pre-cultural concepts such as proximity, separation, order, and surrounding.

During later phases of development, the child experiences “projective space” – predicated

upon the ability to understand and project spatial concepts within the realm of geometric

construction – and “[E]uclidean space” – which requires the recognition of a spatial grid

defined by vertical and horizontal axes. These latter two forms of spatial experience –

which are essential to the child’s understanding of a “topographical schema” – develop

interdependently, as the child learns to dynamically combine various elementary spatial

concepts to understand and express his or her relative position within a plan or layout.85

In order to study this process of development, Piaget describes two experiments

relating to the child’s understandings of projective and Euclidean space. In the first task

the child is shown a doll located within a model environment, then asked to place the doll

in the same position in an identical set-up, rotated 180 degrees to account for the child’s

tendency to rely on topographical considerations. In the second task the child is instructed

to draw a layout diagram of a model village at a reduced scale [420].

In the first of these two experiments, the child in early stages of development

places the doll based almost exclusively upon topological – that is, perceptual as opposed

to conceptual [fig. 21] – relationships, disregarding projective and Euclidean space in

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85 Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child’s Conception of Space (1948), trans. F. J. Langdon and J. L. Lunzer, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967: 419.

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Figure 21. During early stages of development, the child is unable to produce geometric copies. Nevertheless, the pre-cultural child recognizes and expresses elementary spatial concepts such as "proximity" and "enclosure."

favor of elementary constructions such as proximity and enclosure [422-3]. This inability

to consider the task from a specific point of view, which demonstrates the child’s lack of

identification with the ego-boundary, is indicative of Piaget’s practical phase of

development [424]. During later stages the child – through the “logical multiplication” of

elementary spatial relationships – begins to demonstrate recognition of projective and

Euclidean space [425-6]. The child is able to successfully place the doll once he or she

has developed the ability to take into consideration a sufficiently complex array of

perceptual spatial concepts.

Similarly, the child’s successful reproduction of the plan in the second task

requires a selection of particular point of view (that becomes part of “identity

formation”), as well as of a method of pictorial representation (that belongs to “cultural

adaptation”). Furthermore, the reduction in scale requires an understanding of a system of

coordinates, extending over both the model village and the surface upon which the

representation is to be made [426]. The child develops first the ability to recognize a one-

to-one relationship between actual and representative objects, then begins to relate

objects to one another, and finally grows to understand each object’s relationship to the

overall coordinate system [428-9].

Interestingly, Piaget makes note of the child’s “timorous attitude towards empty

space” when performing this task during early stages, attributing the tendency to arrange

elements near one edge of the representational surface to a prioritization of perceptual

continuity over operational accuracy [435]. The child’s “fear of empty space,” Piaget

explains, is overcome through his or her development of conceptual spatial awareness

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[440]. This fear is reminiscent of the anxiety experienced by Kjär; however, while Klein

couches creative expression in terms of bypassing culturally-defined parameters of

communication, Piaget describes here an example of enculturation as creative

empowerment, as the child’s anxiety conquered through geometric education.

As with the example of the knot, the child’s initial struggles to represent three-

dimensional reality within a two-dimensional plane reveals the conceptual weakness of

topological – as compared to projective and Euclidean – space within the realm of

abstract representation. The work of Winnicott again provides an interesting point of

comparison. Whereas Winnicott’s squiggle interview technique facilitates the child’s pre-

cultural expression via projection into the creative void, in Piaget’s experiments the

representation of external reality requires a culturally-defined understanding of three-

dimensional reality, as well as of the geometric conventions by which this reality may be

translated into two dimensions. As a result, the child clings anxiously to the edge of

representational surface until he or she has acquired the set of skills necessary to

“properly” fill the void. Indeed, Piaget credits a combination of enculturation (including

geometric education) and natural psychological development in the mature child’s ability

to successfully complete this task [445-6].

In her interpretation of Ravel and Colette’s L’enfant et les Sortileges, Klein

downplays the child’s instinctual acts as inevitable and, more importantly, useless within

the context of psychological development. Similarly, Rank advances an anti-functionalist

view of creative play in children, and recognizes the value of artistic expression only

insofar as it is mediated by, and subject to the scrutiny of, culturally-defined “aesthetic

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values.” Winnicott, however, provides a more dynamic model for interpreting pre-cultural

expression, focusing most intently on the promotion of psychological development

through the design of an environment that simultaneously protects the child from threats

and exposes him or her to the possibility of creative expression. This appeal to the value

of the child’s perspective is also evident in the works of Piaget, who – like Winnicott –

recognizes not only the far-reaching impact of the psychological character of the external

world, but also the importance of the child’s pre-cultural reality within his or her

development of the ability to invent and represent.86

Van Eyck and the architectural threshold

Piaget’s writings underscore the importance of effectively translating theoretical

advances in child psychology into the realm of architectural reality. This necessity is

made manifest in the consideration of the role of playgrounds in defining the character of

the urban landscape. According to historian Susan Solomon, the design of playgrounds

represent an opportunity for the architect to affect both individuals and communities by

enacting theories of play in a manner that both facilitates the child’s creative explorations

and encourages productive social interactions.87 Playgrounds often offer a unique

opportunity for the architect to escape the disruptive forces of economic and commercial

considerations and focus instead on the creation of spaces that properly facilitate the

child’s psychological maturation [2-3].

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86 Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, trans. Margaret Cook, New York: International Universities Press, 1952: 341.87 Susan G. Solomon, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005: 2.

Along these lines, adventure playgrounds in post-war Europe were purported to

apply contemporary developments in psychological thought to the child’s built world,

embracing the child’s destructive impulse by providing scraps of construction material as

play objects. Within these “utopian setting[s],” the child’s experience was characterized

by “camaraderie” and “uncontrolled activity.” Yet despite such innovation, “junk

playgrounds” were physically enclosed, and children’s activities were loosely governed a

“play leader.”88 Paradoxically, these playgrounds created an environment of free

expression and interaction by means of enclosure and authoritative direction. As Roy

Kozlovsky has observed:

[O]n the one hand, modernity has conceptualized play as a biologically inherited drive that is spontaneous, pleasurable, and free. It valorized the subjective experience of play as an attribute of the autonomous, individual self. On the other hand, modern societies began to rationalize and shape children’s play from the outside to advance social, educational, and political goals.89

Indeed, rather than conceptualizing the playgrounds as facilitators of the child’s

instinctual urges to play and create, Kozlovsky characterizes these designs as

psychological enclosures, instruments of social control representing a politically-imposed

shift from a “contractual” to a “subjective” model of citizenship. By engendering through

a process of enculturation the culturally-constructed desire to be “free,” Kozlovsky

argues, “[t]he adventure playground manifests this model of power: through it, the

welfare state brought children’s interiority under observation and indirectly shaped it

from the outside, while its consenting subjects experienced this employment of power as

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88 Ibid: 12-3.89 Roy Kozlovsky, “Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, eds. Martha Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008: 171.

a space of freedom and agency” [172-3]. In the case of adventure playgrounds,

psychological principles were appropriated by those in power – under the guise of

promoting free play and creative expression – in order to gain access to the child’s

internal reality while manipulating his or her external reality for political ends.

The playground designs of mid-twentieth century Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck

demonstrate an awareness of the effects of the physical environment upon the child’s

inner reality, as well as the important role to be played by the child within the urban

context. The two-fold nature of this relationship is indicative of the designs as appealing

to the child’s “subjective” phase of development. Of particular interest to the

consideration of architecture as a permeable boundary is the importance placed by van

Eyck upon the threshold, based in part on his studies of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

Buber defines threshold space as the “bearer of inter-human events,” and art as “witness

to the relationship between humans and nature.”90 In this way, he bestows architecture

with the enhanced importance of mediating human relationships, both with the natural

world and within the realm of social interaction.

Van Eyck’s playgrounds aspire towards these ideals by attempting to integrate the

child into his or her urban context, thus facilitating two-way interaction between the child

and the city.91 On the one hand, the city is opened up to the child, its objects now acting

as potential mediums for creative expression. On the other hand, the urban environment

is recognized to profoundly affect the child’s psychological development, reinforcing the

importance of child-centered design. Van Eyck describes his playgrounds – often sited

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90 Georges Teyssot, “Aldo van Eyck’s Threshold: The Story of an Idea,” Log 11 (Winter 2008): 34.91 Aldo van Eyck, “Child and City,” in Collected Articles and Other Writings: 1947-1998, eds. Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven, Amsterdam: SUN, 2008: 104.

upon previously vacant plots of land – as responsive to both their sites and users.92 Many

of Van Eyck’s playgrounds are bordered by low curbs, separating the places of play from

the street without creating a physical barrier [16]. In this manner, van Eyck – like Günter

and Neutra – simulates within a real-world context several concepts described by

psychoanalytic theorists. By constructively filling voids in the urban landscape and

enclosing them within semi-permeable boundaries, his designs facilitate within the user a

simultaneous sense of security and freedom to engage the totality of the urban landscape.

Van Eyck’s Bertelmanplein playground in Amsterdam exemplifies many of these

guiding principles. Materials and colors match the surrounding urban landscape,

representing physically and symbolically the playground’s integration into its urban

context. The playground’s various elements are arranged non-hierarchically; thus the

function of each object is limited only by the child’s imagination [18]. The wall enclosing

the sandbox, for example, acts as a semi-permeable boundary that can be climbed upon or

jumped over, and also provides seating for parents, reducing the significance of the

culturally-defined hierarchy between children and their guardians [fig. 22]. Similarly,

play tables provide a surface upon which children can create objects by molding sand.

The materiality of van Eyck’s objects – crafted from untreated wood, concrete, and metal

– further appeal to the child’s pre-cultural experience, exposing him or her to an array of

psychologically stimulating textures [19].

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92 Susan G. Solomon, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005: 14-5.

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Figure 22. The sandbox at Van Eyck’s Bertelmanplein playground in Amsterdam is surrounded by a semi-permeable architectural threshold.

Echoing Winnicott’s ideals, van Eyck’s designs do not impose cultural definitions

for object use, but instead encourage the child’s own processes of discovery. To this end,

his playgrounds are filled with elementary forms, relevant to the child’s topographical

spatial experience and serving as an educational tool within his or her psychological

development [114]. To van Eyck, the playground serves the dual roles of exposing the

child to the city and forcing the city to reconcile with the presence of its children. As the

architect explains:

If we create a playground well, we create a world [...] in which the city rediscovers the child. We must not ask the child to discover the city, without at the same time wanting the city to rediscover the child.93

In conceiving of architecture’s primary role as facilitating interaction among its users,

van Eyck sought through his playground designs to transform “space” into “place” and

“time” into “occasion.”94

Beyond conceiving of built objects as representing a boundary between internal

and external reality, van Eyck’s design ideals are centered more cogently around the

concept of architectural threshold. Like Neutra – who included features meant to mediate

the transition between interior and exterior space – van Eyck’s designs endeavor

simultaneously to protect the child and to facilitate his or her creative expression.

Physical manifestations of the permeable threshold are evident throughout van Eyck’s

playgrounds, both along the perimeter that separates the playground from the surrounding

city, and at smaller scales within the playground’s interior. By minimizing the importance

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93 Aldo van Eyck, “On the design of play equipment and the arrangement of playgrounds,” in Collected Articles and Other Writings: 1947-1998, eds. Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven, Amsterdam: SUN, 2008: 119.94 Liane Lefaivre, “Space, place and play,” in The Playgrounds and the City, eds. Liane Lefaivre and Ingeborg de Roode, Amsterdam: Stedlijk Museum Amsterdam, 2002: 24.

of culturally-defined function and instead encouraging creative expression as a means of

social interaction, van Eyck’s playgrounds incorporate the Winnicottian notions of

transitional objects and creative play while adhering to the importance placed by Piaget

on geometric education. Also like Neutra, Van Eyck embraced the ideal of participatory

design, creating playgrounds at the request of local citizen groups and adapting each

design to its specific local context.95

Van Eyck’s focus on the child in general, and on urban playgrounds in particular,

takes place within a larger postwar context of “child empowerment” [58], yet such

considerations seem to have informed designs throughout his architectural career.

According to Liane Lefaivre, his works represents “an entirely different approach to

urbanism, incremental, interstitial, ludic, participatory, ground up and polycentered rather

than top down and monocentered” [77], which can also be characterized as “child-like”

and thus ostensibly “pre-cultural.” Moreover, in van Eyck’s designs the boundary

between pre-cultural and cultural forms appears not only permeable but also inverted; the

adult architect reclaims childhood experience and creativity through his willingness to

create with the child’s perspective in mind.

Through their works, both Piaget and van Eyck opened new avenues of

theoretical exploration into the child’s psychological development. Piaget’s research

demonstrates the validity of many of the principles advocated by Winnicott and other

post-Freudian theorists, while van Eyck’s playgrounds are representative of the

applicability of these theories within the contexts of architectural and urban design.

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95 Liane Lefaivre, Aldo van Eyck, Humanist Rebel: Inbetweening in a Postwar World, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999: 17.

Piaget’s description of the child’s maturational process places a renewed emphasis upon

the environment, and inspires a more nuanced examination of the process of

enculturation. Similarly, van Eyck’s playgrounds demonstrate the role of architecture as a

fundamental constituent within the child’s physical and emotive experience, while the

framing of his designs as mediating the child’s social and environmental interactions

strengthens the notion of the urban form as an agent of the child’s education.96

Nevertheless, the two-fold nature of the permeable boundary emphasizes a

recurring paradox in the design of the child’s environment. Although the process of

participatory design attempts to incorporate the child’s psychical inputs into the

architect’s professional realm, inevitably this incorporation is mediated by cultural norms

and traditions that – while perhaps well-intentioned – are nevertheless as arbitrary as they

are ubiquitous. Creative expression offers insight into pre-cultural spatial experience; but

interpretation of the child’s projections is inevitably biased toward the analyst’s own

culturally-mediated reality. Architecture functions psychologically to shape the

environment in which the child develops; but the design of architectural objects is

dictated by forces that lie well beyond the child’s control or free will, conditioned by the

architect’s cultural politics and psychological biases.

* * *

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96 Roy Kozlovsky, “Reconstruction through the Child: English Modernism and the Welfare State” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008): 226.

Beginning with the example of Ravel and Colette’s opera, each of the case studies

presented in this thesis demonstrates an inherent tension between the destructive and

creative character of the child’s pre-cultural actions. As psychoanalytic theory developed

between the early- and mid-twentieth century, the child’s destructive urges – once

regarded as a defense against internal processes – became characterized further as a

reaction to the restrictions imposed by external cultural conditions. Identity-formation,

initially understood exclusively in terms of the child’s inner world, was recognized as a

process inextricably linked to his or her assimilation to the external environment – from

housing interiors to the larger framework of the city. The gradual recognition of pre-

cultural expression gave rise to an emphasis on the functional value of creativity during

play. The rational response to this realization is represented by the professional urge to

formally codify such creativity in both writing and building practice. However, it is

precisely such formal codification that may also prevent the child’s perspective of ever

fulfilling its potential within the realm of cultural and architectural discourse.

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Image List

Figures 1 - 6. Screen captures from Ravel, Maurice. L’enfant et les sortileges [ballet version], DVD. Directed by Netherlands Dance Theater (Jiri Kylian). Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2001.

Figure 7. Author’s diagram. Based upon information in O’Donnell, Caroline. “Diagram as Remedy: Decoding Freud’s Diagrams.” In Pidgin 1 (Spring 2006): 184-99.

Figures 8 - 16. Screen captures from Ravel, Maurice. L’enfant et les sortileges [ballet version], DVD. Directed by Netherlands Dance Theater (Jiri Kylian). Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2001.

Figure 17 - 18. Winnicott, D. W. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena – A Study of the First Not-Me Possession.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 95.

Figure 19. Günter, Michael. Playing the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Interviews with Children Using Winnicott’s Squiggle Technique. London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2007: 45.

Figure 20. Lavin, Sylvia. Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004: 63.

Figure 21. Author’s diagram. Based upon images in Piaget, Jean. “The Child’s Conception of Space” (1948). In The Essential Piaget, eds. Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Voneche. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1977: 598-9.

Figure 22. Solomon, Susan G. American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005: 17.

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