Street-corner therapy

identity, space, and community practice

pp. 91-108

in: Heather Macdonald, Cultural and critical explorations in community psychology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

In the quotidian life of the clinician, spatial arrangements in any given geographic environment are usually traversed without much conscious thought or observation. We tend to notice morphology and space only in moments of extreme beauty or extreme danger, typically when we are pulled out of our egoistic framework and allow our consciousness to fill in the scene before us. As Cezanne once said, "The landscape thinks itself through me and I am its consciousness' (as cited in Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 67). Rarely do we bring this kind of attention or perception to our daily surroundings: the building, the stationary furniture, lamps, windows, and the positioning of bodies within these spaces are not necessarily considered aspects of our psychic architecture. I wonder, how does the shape and atmosphere of a room or a street corner dictate the choreography between therapist and client? This type of question seems to run counter to the usual dismissal of material space and artifacts that make up the consulting room in more traditional psychoanalytic settings (Kingsbury, 2004). However, in nontraditional therapeutic environments, the material setting cannot be ignored and demands to be included as a live character within the relational narrative itself.