Repressed Spaces (The poetics of Agoraphobia)

In Repressed Spaces, Paul Carter tours the cultural history of agoraphobia, the fear of open space. Its symptoms were first described in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, the British scholar and writer, although it wasn´t until 1871 that Carl Otto Westphal coined the term to describe several of his patients who experienced severe anxiety when walking through streets or squares. There have been many attempts to explain and treat the condition: critics of modernization have linked it to bad city planning; psychoanalysts, calling it "street panic", have blamed it on the Oedipus complex; psychiatrists have tied it to existential insecurity and describe it as the fear of places or situations which have triggered panic attacks. Sigmund Freud believed that agoraphobia, like all phobias, was part of an "anxiety neurosis" and had a sexual origin.Taking as his starting point the fact that Freud himeslf was agoraphobic, and analyzing the way peole have negotiated open spaces from Greek and Roman times to the present day, he finds that "space fear" ultimatley results from the inhibition of movement. Along the way, Paul Carter asks why Freud repressed his agoraphobia, and examines literature, the work of theorists including Le Corbusier, Benjamin and R.D. Laing, artists such as Munch, Lapique and Giacometti, and the German "street films" of the 1920s. He concludes by proposing a new way of regarding open space, a new "poetics of agoraphobia", which is sensitive to an agoraphobe´s point of view and will provide lessons for architects and urbal planners today.