Things and the Unconscious: What do we fantasize about in the analyst’s office?

It is difficult to imagine a psychoanalyst’s office without upholstered furniture. Sitting comfortably on a couch or chair during the session, the patient relaxes and immerses himself in his own fantasies. But this does not mean that the space that surrounds him does not cease to influence him.

From the moment contact is established, the patient unconsciously becomes accustomed to his surroundings. He studies furniture, interior elements, materials, plants, which are initially dissolved in the general background. He creates his own landmarks and meaningful lines of movement between pieces of furniture, paintings and more.

As a result, a close connection arises between his unconscious representations and the environment. The patient discovers a space on the principle of a nesting doll, where the analyst’s face and body are represented by the smallest nesting doll, the office and building are medium, the street and city district are large.

The order in which the client visually perceives them is reflected in the narcissistic body image he has. On the other hand, it refers him to unconscious conflicts. If you try to voice his narcissistic position, it may look like this: «A creature as valuable as me has nothing to do in this old house (I deserve more)»; «this arrogant analyst is unworthy of a beloved being like me (I deserve more)»; finally, “this analyst looks too kind and too amiable for me (I don’t deserve this)” and so on.

In the dynamics of treatment, not only the interior of the office can play a role, but also the reception room, in which the patient sometimes has to wait for the beginning of the session, and even the building itself, in which the work takes place.

Many symptoms may appear in the patient’s attitude to an office located on a high or basement floor. Patients with phobias are put off by barred elevators because they can directly see up and down, which can remind them of many dream images, while closed elevators with sliding doors create a feeling of isolation, which in some patients can provoke an attack of claustrophobia.

What to do with such cases? Often they are not amenable to elaboration, because the patient is overwhelmed with anxiety, he feels that in the situation itself the oppressive past revives again, the prisoner of which he unconsciously feels himself to be, and this immediately pushes him to flee.

All these circumstances should be taken into account during the initial consultations and further, during the analytical work. I will give two examples from clinical practice that clarify the complex relationship between the patient’s unconscious and the space he perceives.

Sergei

A 20-year-old art student suffered from recurring depression. For a number of reasons, the family situation in which he developed formed such a deep bond between him and his mother that all other people turned out to be outsiders in relation to her.

It was extraordinarily difficult for him to build a psychological picture of the relationship between him and his mother, so as not to harm their close relationship and at the same time help him become independent without «falling through» into loneliness.

Gradually, I began to notice that Sergey comes before the appointed time and sits on the steps of the stairs leading to the office where my office is located (an office on the basement floor) or walks through the basement. I said hello and just did my business, at the appointed time he was waiting at the door of the office.

During this period, he devoted all the time of the session to stories about the place where the house itself is located. Then — descriptions of the premises located on the basement floor, then proceeded to the description of the office premises and at the end — the office. Depression decreased, he was able to return to school and live in a separate room from his mother and her family.

It must be said that I did not do transference interpretations, we spent hours discussing what I called the “matryoshka” above, the nesting of visual images one into another. At the end of the treatment, Sergei said that the most important thing for him was to observe «the life of the building, the life of the rooms in it.»

What he called «life» included the coexistence of rooms, their interaction with each other, and how I treated each of the rooms, including the office. How she reacted to the “needs” of the premises (cleaned, decorated, repaired, called the emergency service). She allowed them to live their own lives, the life of this particular room, and not another.

So Sergei used the place of analysis to project and work through the internal conflict associated with his own identity.

plant life

Plants in the analytic space quickly become symbols of life and its problems. At first they are perceived by the patient as elements completely dissolved in the environment, but gradually become the subject of discussion.

I think each of us has met people who take time to distinguish a plant from a piece of furniture, a real plant from an artificial one. It is the «artificial» character of the analytic situation that is often first associated with the fantasy that the analytic plants are fake.

The growth of a plant that occurs in front of a patient lying on a couch can be invisible to him and at the same time puzzle him. Thus he denies him continuity of development: when the bud he saw three times a week becomes a flower, he may begin to ask, “Where did these flowers come from? Did you specifically tie them to the branches?” Thus the patient essentially rejects the distinction between an object endowed with life and a lifeless object.

Marina

A twenty-five-year-old woman was undergoing analysis, including due to «psychogenic» infertility; for her, order comes first, then work, health. My plants never interested her and we never talked about them. At one session, she suddenly remarks in a low, sugary voice that she has already seen several times that I do not immediately put the books in their place in the closet after using them, while the palm tree, on the contrary, is always watered.

She adds that if time is short, it is better to put the books away rather than water the palm tree. I explain that this is impossible, because the palm tree, if you follow her advice, will die, but the book will not. My words bring Marina to insight: the death of all the plants that she had, in her mind, was associated not with a rare and stingy care for them, but, like her barrenness, with an incomprehensible whim of nature.

The water she saw in the pan made her realize the difference between that which is endowed with life and that which does not. This brought Marina back to questions about the quality of maternal care, child-related dependency: anxiety was revealed due to her inability to take care of another, as she was fixated on her complaints.

The symptom «infertility» ceased to mean only a disease of the body. It became a defense against intrusion (of the child) that would force her to abandon the narcissistic stance she considered indispensable when dealing with the aggression of the world in general and the original aggression of her own mother.

These stories show how important it is for the analyst to be attentive to how the elements of the office environment affect the patient. Psychoanalysis is, of course, a place of hearing, but the patient sees and looks too, he uses what he sees in the process of analysis to confirm or refute his fantasies and conjectures.

None of the interior items, not a single sign, no absence of a sign (after all, the absence of a sign is also a sign) can escape being filled with meaning when they resonate with the patient’s story. The place of analysis must offer the patient a satisfactory image in which he can either recognize himself, or make up for his narcissistic shortcomings, or create a representation of his inner mental life.