“We live inside architectural structures, for instance our own; but at the same time they live inside our minds, in dreams for example; we can build architectural structures, modify them or destroy them.”
Cosimo Schinaia, MD
Genoa
Episode Description:
Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr Cosimo Schinaia. Dr. Schinaia is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and a full member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He has been a psychiatrist who has worked as a director of the Mental Health Department of central Genoa for many years where he now works in private practice. Dr. Schinaia is widely published – a number of his papers in English are: On Preservation and Destruction in the Unconscious: Freud and Bion which was published in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2018; Respect for the Environment Psychoanalytic: Consideration on the Ecological Crisis, which was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2019; and The Feelings of Those Who Have Been Expelled: Notes of a Psychoanalyst Forced to Leave Genoa because of Racial Laws in 1938, published in Trauma and Memory also in 2019.
He has written two books that have been widely translated, the first in On Pedophilia originally published in Italian and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, French and German, and his most recent work which is the subject of today’s conversation, Psychoanalysis and Architecture, the Inside and the Outside, published by Karnac originally in Italian and translated into English and Spanish.
As you will hear in today’s interview Cosimo shares his Italian point of view on the role of the environment in reflecting our intrapsychic life and also influencing our intrapsychic life.
Key Takeaways:
[[4:32] Dr. Schinaia shares why he has a special interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and architecture.
[6:20] The symbolism of a house in dreams.
[9:35] The difference between the European consulting rooms in comparison to the Americans and their implications in the psychoanalytic process.
[12:00] The case of a patient whispering sexual material and forcing the analyst to get closer to her.
[15:20] Different generations of psychoanalysts and the settings of the consulting offices.
[16:40] Dr. Schinaia talks about the excess of intersubjectivity in self-disclosure.
[18:05] The particularities of Kleinian offices.
[21:49] Clinical example where attention to the architectural space has played a part in deepening the work with the patient: the influence of the light in a consulting room.
[27:11] Dr. Schinaia shares his motivation to study the relationship between architecture and psychoanalysis.
Recommended Readings:
On Preservation and Destruction in the Unconscious: Freud and Bion, Dr. Cosimo Schinaia
On Paedophilia, Dr Cosimo Schinaia
Psychoanalysis and Architecture, the Inside and the Outside, Dr Cosimo Schinaia