The Complex Relationship between Structural and Psychic Space: When Two Cultures/Homes Collide

ABSTRACT

The relationship between one’s home and its internal representation is a complex one. Imbued with memories of desire, loss, fear and anxiety, these often emerge in the analytic space and wait for interpretation and understanding. The analysts’ ability to use their countertransference and explore the patient’s underlying feelings often reveals the impact of culture and surround on the patient’s contemporary experience of space.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural homes
• psychic space
• architectural space
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monisha Nayar-Akhtar

Monisha Nayar-Akhtar, Ph.D., obtained her Masters and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Later, she trained at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute in adult and child/adolescent analysis. After practicing for over twenty years in Southfield, Michigan, she relocated to suburban Philadelphia. Currently, she is affiliated with the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia where she is a Training and Supervising Analyst. She is an active member of the American Psychoanalytic Association where she served as a member of the Program committee until 2020 and as chair of the Clinical Workshop on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis until 2018. She has a keen interest in Applied Psychoanalysis and in promoting psychoanalytic thinking in India, her country of origin. Her current projects include providing ongoing clinical training workshops in trauma and attachment to psychotherapists working with children and adolescents. In 2018, she established the Indian American Psychoanalytic Alliance in Philadelphia, a nonprofit organization that provided a two-year distance learning program in psychodynamic psychotherapy. Her current project includes training therapists in early intervention and establishing a Therapeutic Play Center to provide therapies for disturbed children between the ages of 2 and 6. She has edited two books: One titled Play and Playfulness and the other titled Identities in Transition. She is the editor-in-chief of a journal Institutionalised Children: Explorations and Beyond, which she, as its editor in chief, helped launch in May 2014. This peer reviewed journal, published by Sage Publications, presents papers from the SAARC region on issues pertinent to children and adolescents who are orphaned or in need of care and protection. She is on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and Adolescent as well. She is a recipient of the Ticho Award and presented a paper titled “Psychic Space, Structural Space, Cyber Space, Desire and Intimacy in a Digital World,” in Chicago, 2016, during the spring meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Akhtar is in private practice and has an office in Center City, Philadelphia.