Psychogeography is the study of how issues, experiences and processes that result from growing up in a human body are symbolized and played out in the wider social and natural worlds. Just as our sense of place in the universe has been irrevocably altered by the discoveries of William Harvey, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, the concept of psychogeography and the discoveries of its poineering researchers imply a startling reevaluation of how we perceive ourselves, human society and the natural world. This book assembles key contributions - some classics, other contemporary - in the study of psychogeography. Together these articles constitute an intellectual and historical foundation for the psychological study of images of the world and of society. From the psychogeographic viewpoint, what people consciously experience as the external world actually has unconscious, internal roots in youthful constructs and defences. The world comes to embody human male and female anatomy, incestuous strivings, inner splits between good and bad, separation conflicts, and family relations.
The scope of the psychogeographic vision is broad, encompassing geological features, geographic formations, and manmade structures, as well as more abstract constructs such as the boundary between "us" and "them", the psychological meaning of cities and nations, and the soaring of the human imagination into outer space. "Maps from the Mind" offers a theoretical framework within which the relationship between the image and experience of growing up in the human body and the construction and perception of spatial meanings can be explored. Not only does this psychogeographic framework have considerable explanatory value, but it renders people's enormous affective attachment to their group boundaries (ethnic, religious, tribal, national, professional) more comprehensible.
- ISBN10 0806122323
- ISBN13 9780806122328
- Publish Date 1 December 1989
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 2 February 2007
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Oklahoma Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 272
- Language English