Summary: Architecture, Art and Psychoanalysis. A four part podcast recorded by Paul Mitchell at the Anna Freud Centre on Saturday 14th July 2012. This conference brought together practitioners and theorists from different fields to think about the emotional experience of architecture and architectural spaces. In home, theatre, church, museum, or transformations of space in contemporary art, architecture and mental space interact in ways that indicate the role of unconscious process in the built environment. Part 4: The Homes of Childhood : Spaces of Love, Dread, and Play Salman Akhtar ABSTRACT The emotional biography of our childhood homes goes beyond the architectural envelopes they provide for our mentalized and un-mentalized erotic, hostile, tender, civic, and spiritual aspirations. Internalized, their corridors, closets, and cloisters function as life-long psychic retreats and springboards for mental rejuvenation. Driven by naive hope, we visit them in actuality and come back wounded. But then the plump nursemaid of nostalgia leads us back to those very streets and lampposts and we return with a poem in our hands. As we grow old, life's intoxication gradually changes into tipsy indifference, but arriving at our eternal resting place we are unexpectedly clear-eyed. We see that we have ended up where we started from. Our childhood homes might have been lost but childhood itself has turned out to be our home. Loyally and forever. Salman Akhtar was born in India and completed his medical and psychiatric education there. Upon arriving in the USA in 1973, he repeated his psychiatric training at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and then obtained psychoanalytic training from the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. Currently, he is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. His more than 300 publications include nine books: Broken Structures; Quest for Answers; Inner Torment; Immigration and Identity; New Clinical Realms; Objects of Our Desire; Regarding Others; Turning Points in Dynamic Psychotherapy; and The Damaged Core, as well as twenty-six edited or co-edited volumes in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and cultural psychology. He is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia. An accomplished poet himself, his latest publication is Between Hours (Karnac 2012), a collection of poems by fellow-psychoanalysts. He says of this project: “While accommodating playfulness and even a bit of audacity, both psychoanalysis and poetry deeply respect formality of structure, nuance of affect, and the multifaceted resonance of the spoken word.... To put it bluntly, psychoanalysis is two-person poetry and poetry one-person psychoanalysis.”
