The Dictionary of Human Geography

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with each other and against others in ways that

generate highly potent lines of demarcation.

While Sibley’s (1995) account draws primarily

on object relations psychoanalysis, Robert

Wilton (2003) draws on Freud’s concept of

castration together with Lacan’s reworking to

explore how the geographical exclusion of dis-

abled people may serve to shore up illusions of

‘ableism’ (cf.disability). Lacanian readings of

Freud are also evident in geographical accounts

of topics such asracism(Nast, 2000) and

embodied experiences of cities (Pile, 1996).

A product of nineteenth-century European

culture, Freud hypothesized that the repressed

unconscious contains much material of a sex-

ual nature, which would be highly disruptive if

allowed to break through into consciousness.

He argued that in order to grow up in socially

acceptable ways, boys and girls were called

upon to repress their ‘natural’, sexual (or libid-

inal) desires. Normative heterosexual mascu-

linity and femininity were theorized by Freud

as demanding psychical achievements.

Although aspects of his theories ofgender

and sexual identity have been highly contro-

versial, his approach has also been welcomed

as a resource for challenging assumptions

about what is ‘natural’, and for elaborating a

theory of subjectivity as situated in a zone of

creative interplay between the ‘personal’ and

the ‘cultural’. For this reason, some feminist

geographers have turned to psychoanalysis in

their theorizations of the interplay between

gender, sexuality, subjectivity and space,

and to contribute to critiques of the ‘mascu-

linism’ of dominant forms of knowledge

(Rose, 1996; Nast, 2000: seefeminist geog-

raphies). Against critics who consider psycho-

analysis to be an intrinsically individualistic

theory and practice, these applications find

that it offers a powerful way of understanding

how social and cultural milieux are embodied

and personalized by human individuals, as

well as how unconscious aspects of human life

are manifest in the social world. lb

Suggested reading

Bondi (2005); Callard (2003); Craib (1990);

Sibley (2003).

psychogeography The ‘study of the precise

laws and specific effects of the geographic

environment, consciously organized or not,

on the emotions and behavior of individuals’,

according to Guy Debord (1981 [1955], p. 5).

Psychogeography is typically traced back to

this definition, and to the activities of Debord

and members of the Letterist International in

1950s Paris, for whom it was a means of

exploring urban spaces andeveryday life,

and who established it as a key concern of

the earlysituationists. Yet the definition’s

academic tone belies its politicized and playful

engagement with cities, as a way of challenging

dominant representations and practices, and

seeking to change urban spaces and life as part

of a revolutionary project. Psychogeography

combined a conscious and political analysis

of urban ambiences with experiments in ludic

behaviour, principally throughde ́rivesor drifts

on foot, and included the construction of

‘psychogeographic maps’ that challenged the

values of dominantcartographies.

The term was independently employed by

geographers engaged in politically motivated

versions of environmental psychology in the

late 1960s, especially at Clark University in

Massachusetts, including David Stea and

Denis Wood (Wood, 1987). While influential

on subsequent work in environmental psych-

ology (see alsomental maps), that usage has

been relatively sidelined in the recent resur-

gence of interest in psychogeography since

the 1990s that has taken more inspiration

from the terminology, if not always the polit-

ics, of the situationists. Much interest has been

literary, involving the tracing of a longer trad-

ition of imaginative and wayward urban

exploration, especially in London and Paris,

though writers such as William Blake, Thomas

de Quincey and Charles Baudelaire, and the

surrealists around Andre ́ Breton (see also

fla^neur /fla^ nerie). Contemporary heirs of

this visionary tradition include Iain Sinclair,

whose peripatetic investigations of London,

especially its East End, have done much to

popularize the term ‘psychogeography’

(Coverley, 2006).

Contemporary artists and urban explorers

have also embraced the term in their engage-

ments with emotional and psychic spaces,

through urban interventions as well as new

media (Pinder, 2005a). Recent years have fur-

ther seen a proliferation of psychogeographical

associations or organizations in Europe and

North America, whose investigations ofplaces

have typically been drawn by the marginal,

hiddenandforgotten,andwhosenetworking

has been facilitated by theinternet(and docu-

mented in journals such asTransgressions, 1995–

2001). As psychogeography has moved increas-

ingly into the mainstream, much of its early

radical political edge has been lost. Yet its

political ambitions as well as humour and idio-

syncracies are also finding new and at times

challenging modes of expression. dp

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PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY