Browsing a not terribly high end bookshop in Brisbane, somewhat surprisingly I came across this book:
Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a mirror of self. Exploring the deeper meaning of home, Lake Worth, Nicolas Hays, 2006.[1995]
I have long been fascinated by the relation between home and physical space. Interestingly, there appears to be only a paucity of philosophical reflection on this subject, although I have by no means done an exhaustive search in the area. One work I quite like on this subject is Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness. (Here is a short piece he has written on the subject of home.)
In any case, I have started reading Cooper Marcus’s book and am finding it fascinating. I am no great fan of Jung or psychology in general, but she mixes it with her strong background in architecture (she is a retired Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture from Berkeley) along with references to Bachelard and others, so I am prepared to listen.
As I read, I will post up reflections prompted by the book. As a starting place, I found her description of the difference between Freud and Jung’s approaches quite enlightening. Freud’s notion of the unconscious is a place of isolating and solitary darkness, threat and fear to be conquered, tamed and controlled. Jung’s notion is of a mysterious, collective and not unfriendly (but still dangerous) surrounding cosmos of inspiration allowing the self to expand its boundaries and links to the outside. Freud operated in the mode of colonising power erasing the other, Jung as an explorer and friend of the other. This binary characterisation is of course not entirely accurate, but for me it sparks a whole range of ideas and possible choices that could be made at a collective social and cultural level or choices that could have been made in the problematic twentieth century.
This is what Cooper Marcus says:
For Sigmund Freud, the unconscious was like some dangerous wilderness, and symbols manifested in dreams contained impulses or conflicts the conscious mind needed to conceal. Carl Jung had a very different perception of the unconscious. For him, it had both a personal and a collective component and was “like the night sky, an infinite unknown, studded with myriads of tiny sparks of light that can become the sources of illumination, insight, and creativity for the person in the process of individuation”. (Metzner, p.5), pp.7-8
Refracted Input 