For many of us who engage psychoanalytic theories to help understand the geographies of identity, day-to-day events and the spatialities of change and transformation, this book has been a long-time coming. While not attempting to cover the complete range of psychoanalytic approaches used in geography, it nonetheless comes pretty close, and it certainly evokes an opus that makes important connections between space, society, and the psyche by bringing together constituent parts in a credible and comprehensive way.

As a consequence, for those who work with particular authors of psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, Winnicott, Laing, Laplanche, Klein) there are important connections in this book to their work and to some of the original psychoanalytic structures and musings proposed by Freud. To those who favor authors who attempt to move beyond those structures, or are disturbed by the musings, there are useful lines of flight to be found in this book with the influences of Deleuze, Grosz, Žižek, Irigaray, and others. Many, like myself, who were somewhat dismissive of Freud in light of these new readings, may find themselves going back to the original inspiration and re-reading it with new eyes.

The book incorporates work from new scholars as well as longtime and well-respected geographers in the field. With the exception of a wide-ranging and engaging introduction (that persuasively spatializes some of the bases of psychoanalysis), the book chapters mostly are refreshingly short, some offering focused and quirky renderings that bounce off of already published work, while others provide nuanced tidbits and suggest interesting connections and synergies.

The chapters that excite me most are the politically motivated critical readings of/with psychoanalytic theory. They fulfill the most important promise of combining Freud and his students, and Marx and his students. While Freud was interested in internal psychic formulations and the ways they relate to larger social, political and economic forms, he focused exclusively on the former. By contrast, Marx’s focus was on those larger forms, while maintaining interests in how they were internalized. All the chapters in Psychoanalytic Geographies agree that our psychic worlds are inescapably social and political. Several are dedicated to the ways in which the conditions of our lived experiences are bettered through political interventions (e.g. Rodriguez, Shaw et al, Naraghi, Healy). To the degree that we exist in a restless and problematic exchange of outside and inside -- while accepting the point made in Kingsbury and Piles’ introduction that “things” are never less than doubled, split, mirrored and so forth --,  the ideas of Marx and Freud fitfully reside with each other throughout many parts of this book.

The book is divided into four sections, the first dealing with history and psychoanalytic practice, the second with space and scale, the third with technology, and the fourth with social life and society.  To the extent that the volume provides a coherent rendering of psychoanalytic geographies, it is an important contribution to understand how the world – its spaces, intersections and folds -- works.  The chapters work at all scales, from the inner sanctum of the subconscious (McGeachen), to corporeal and embodied connections (Cavanagh, Proudfoot and Kingsbury), bodily ego (Straughan) and its extensions into rooms (Callard) and architecture (Cavanagh), street and community spaces (Stepney, Blum and Secor), Rodriguez) , urban spaces and urbanization fantasies (Pile, Nast) and global tensions (Shaw et al., Sioh, Healy).

With the inevitable differences between authors’ readings of psychoanalytic texts, the book does not detract from the importance of its larger project to demonstrate the “breadth, depth and vitality” of psychoanalytic geographies.  Nor does it shy away from controversial issues, or try to suggest coherent meta-theories for apprehending the world.  For example, while Stephen Healy’s understanding of Lacan’s  jouissance (page 145) does not go much beyond enjoyment, Ian Shaw and his colleagues engage the concept’s contradictory meanings and take us beyond the original orgasmic or painful pleasure to the darker notion of impossible fulfillment that Lacan elaborated later in his work (page 218, see also the chapter by Proudfoot and Kingsbury).  Healy’s and Shaw’s chapters follow Žižek’s neo-Lacanian insistence on understanding the ways enjoyment is politicized, with Shaw and his colleagues focusing on the ways jouissance is a condition and consequence of nation and militarized schooling, while Healy unpacks the nature of global oil addictions. What I like about both these chapters is the unabashed scaling up of psychoanalytic theory to address national and global problems. I particularly like Healy’s homage to Gibson-Graham’s notion of community economies when he, at the end of his chapter, briefly speaks to the possibility of creating post-carbon eco-municipalities that are economically functional but refuse oil addiction.  Another artful rendering of scaling up comes from Maureen Sioh’s contribution, which focuses on the East Asian financial crisis in terms of a libidinal economy that accounts for Freudian desire, post-colonial anxiety and cathexis by drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon.

Karen Rodriguez provides a similarly evocative and scaled-up example from central Mexico, suggesting the possibility of simultaneous change within and without, creating what Žižek calls a radical ethical act.  Her example focuses on the transformation of gangs and their propensities to narco-violence in the small town of Guanajuata where desire/fantasy/violence are sublimated and symbolized differently through the creative arts.  She draws on Julia Kristeva’s idea that the subject is eternally en procès, meaning both “in process” and “on trial” both within, through, and with space.  Drawing on metaphors from dance and choreography, Rodriguez argues that it is possible to move away from Cartesian ideas of balance and movement to rework centers of gravity towards the periphery and margins of the body and, like modern dance, use those margins as pivot points.  Old capitalist, patriarchal and totalitarian ways of knowing (familial or political) are thus challenged with instabilities that may lead to more creative possibilities in the same way that dancers unblock Cartesian space and experiment with new centers of gravity (elbows, ears). Rodriguez provides an example with the NGO Espacios Posibles (Possible Spaces) and their creative work (theatre, art, music) in a particularly problematic neighborhood in Guanajuata.  While acknowledging the limits of the choreographic metaphor, she uses the success of Espacios Posibles and Kristeva’s push for creativity and the arts (rather like Grosz’s project melding Darwin with Aboriginal dream painting) as an important non-violent challenge to the status-quo at the national level in Mexico.

As important as the scaling-up of psychoanalytic theory is, the book also contains significant contributions that focus on the spatial foldings, twists, splittings and mirrorings of internal/psychic/external/material events.  Virginia Blum and Anna Secor provide an excellent chapter that elaborates Freud’s notion of topological psychic spaces (through his case work on Emma) in relation to material psychical spaces as they narrate the ways with which traumas are coped. In dealing with the psycho-material spatialities of trauma Blum and Secor masterfully map out the connections between Freud’s case study of Emma and her trauma, and the trauma of children at an elementary school playground shooting event. Drawing on their previous work on psycho-topologies, Blum and Secor argue that bending, stretching, and folding of topological spaces are key to understanding the machinations of psychic space.

Like Healy, Jesse Proudfoot and Paul Kingsbury articulate new ways of coming to terms with jouissance by focusing on Lacan’s later writings, in their case an elaboration of masculine sexuation. They argue that geographers have all but missed this important aspect of Lacan’s writing. Focussing on “the subject of the signifier”, they observe, geographers miss the ways that Lacan moves beyond linguistic strictures with the “subject of jouissance”, which is “aligned with the embodiments of jouissance and the drives” (page 244). Healy, Proudfoot and Kingsbury take to task the ways masculine sexuation shows up in a handful of submarine movies by delving into issues of discipline, the authoritarian captain and mutiny (their Lacanian formulas should keep happy mathematical geographers who do not believe that theorization is possible without rigorous methodic delineations). I was disappointed that they did not take on the greatest submarine movie of all, Das Boot, which, I think, aligns with their treatment but with some interesting twists.

Heidi Nast also uses movies to elaborate a Lacanian perspective. As one of the respected and long-standing geographers in this field, she continues her interests in patriarchy and capitalism looking at the context of the machine in classic 1920s and 1930s movies and relating it to the emasculation and redemptions of working class men. She notes important differences between the way men relate to machines in The General and Metropolis on the one hand, and Modern Times on the other and shows how capitalism moves from industrialized machines to Fordist assembly lines. Nast finishes by suggesting  that since the 1950s something insidious has happened in the USA, with de-industrialization, that pits colorized labor streams with the decline of the bastions of white working class employment. Steve Pile delves into the salubrious places of Las Vegas through the movie The Hangover. By so doing, he pushes his enduring interests in the psycho-geographies of the city and articulates urban spaces of repression.

Another long-standing geographer in the field, Felicity Callard provides a wonderful trip through the spaces of psychiatrists’ consulting rooms past and present, which dovetails in quirky ways with her famous work on agoraphobic spaces. Liz Bondi expands upon Freud’s geographic contribution with a look at global variations in psychoanalytic theory and practice as particular places took up his ideas. Bondi, in her chapter, notes the mutability of interior and exterior for Freud, suggesting important relations between economies and how they are apprehended and internalized.  Another heavy-weight in psychoanalytic geography, Mary Thomas, uses her chapter to push further the work of Laplanche that she elaborated in her recent book on girl power, and uses it to challenge the field of children’s geographies away from its fear of engaging child sexualities.

The volume announces itself as “path-breaking” and a “core text” for understanding fundamental geographic questions, and how geographical understandings can offer new ways of thinking psychoanalytically.  I see the volume less as path-breaking (although it certainly has some interesting innovations) and more as a coming-of-age for psychoanalytic geographies.  No doubt it will become the core text in the subfield for it substantiates and brings together a number of strands of psycho-spatial thinking that began in the 1980s,  with the work of Burgess, Sibley and others.  I do not anticipate a deluge of new psycho-geographies based upon this volume, not because the field is small (as Kingsbury and Pile admit in the introduction), but because it is already very much part of the curriculum of new cultural geography students.  That said, I do expect a couple of lines of flight and I predict those will align with some of the scaling up that I talk about in this review.  In sum, Psychoanalytic Geographies is a fine volume that follows with exciting nuances ideas that began to bubble to the surface of the geographical consciousness over three decades ago.