The Compass and the Couch

What is the connection between a compass and a couch? It is the meeting of a mechanical gadget used for geographical orientation on the planet, together with another artifact, one of furniture, which has become the icon of the psychoanalytic practice. Both objects allow us to orient ourselves in uncertainty and in darkness with regard to our own subjective, intimate or physical position. Within an effort to encompass the heterogeneous, Mariano Horenstein provides specific conceptual tools that examine different meanings of the notions of “place” and “encounter” from a psychoanalytic perspective. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines the fields of topology, architecture, geography, and archaeology, this book enables an in-depth understanding of the idea of “space” and explores new aspects in the current debate of this timely issue.