jPSA-online aims to get itself published twice a year, in the form of collections of essays, clinical studies, reviews, response articles, and position papers about the relations of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis to architecture, the landscape, and places created in art, photography, fiction, and film. The journal aims to map the provocative spaces between the political pamphlet, the travel guide, and the novel.

jPSA encourages critical theory, speculative writing, exposition, and critical reviews. It requires direct engagement of the writings and ideas of Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and critical secondary sources in the study of architectural conditions in terms of therapy, enjoyment, fantasy, the public good, and technology in relation of psychoanalysis to architecture. Responses to published work, and replies from original authors, are encouraged.

First Issue: Lalangue and the Poché of Architecture

In his essay, “La troisième,” Lacan revises Descartes’ je pense donc je suis to read: “I think … therefore it enjoys itself (se jouit, meaning the unconscious). Se jouit inverts another mysterious expression, je souis. The ambitious and hardworking translator, Yolanda Szczech, offers the following: “Perhaps the neologism je souis can be broken down as je suis sous, i.e. I am under it, or I am subject to it? Puns, spoonerisms, slips of the tongue, and other kinds of word play go as far as they can to formalize language’s in-between sighs, gasps, hiccups, moans, and murmurs to suggest, as soon as the formal rationality of grammar, vocabulary, and rhetoric have left home for the day, the mice (ratones? as in “cuando el gato no está, los ratones bailan”—when the cat’s away the mice/rats will play) contribute a further short-circuiting, from Goya’s famous engraving, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (El sueño del razón produce monstruous). Reason, after all, needs to sleep. It commits errors, slips … atrocities. It leaves gaps, jagged edges, unfinished ideas. It hides its accounting errors. Its sleep is troubled but curative. The only thing to be done is to induce a coma, allow the “patient” to heal, then wake her/him up again.

Just as Dorothy Gale in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz required a coma-induced dream visit to a magical kingdom where the lapidary imagination constructed an Emerald City full of AI devices, both the psyche and architecture need an in-between, not to connect things seamlessly but to suspend them, babble them, tangling their chords and mangling their attempts to make sense.

In architecture, uninhabited-unthought spaces are typically designated by the French word poché, referring to the drawing technique of tapping tiny dots used to indicate concrete or other no-user-access interiors. Some of these are known only to specialty sub-contractors who deal with plumbing, electrical wires, heating and cooling equipment; others house rodents, insect invaders, and imagined monsters.

These unvisitable spaces are re-attached, virtually, as we attempt to re-secure some mental modicum of safety and solidity. Poché is thus, in addition to its role as an untouched surplus, a congeries of folk-belief, graphic cover-up, and personal fantasy. Make of it what you will but do not underestimate it. It is nothing less than the emperor of the material imagination.

Any essay worth its salt must engage architecture and psychoanalysis in mutually structuring ways, employing what Dan Collins has called “interpretation by the cut,” versus interpretation as a series of captions. Prospective authors must submit two substantially different essays, one under a legal name, another under a pen-name. Links to other media, such as projects or presentations documented by YouTube videos, is encouraged.

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CALL FOR PAPERS WILL BE SENT OUT AFTER THE SECOND LALANGUE/TINY-HOUSE ZOOM

Format and length: Download the sample file (with formatting instructions) HERE. Download the sample file here. Essays should be around 6000 words (up to 12,000 words if the topic and complexity require). Illustrations should be limited to what is essential to the idea and submitted separately in a PowerPoint file, with captions (see sample file for instructions).

Peer Review: Papers selected will be reviewed mutually, by topic-defined peers, for critiques and suggestions.

Quality: Proposal must address the theme and connect Jacques Lacan’s idea of lalangue to the architecture of the in-between, variously interpreted. Final article length, 6000 words unless a compelling argument is made otherwise. As Lacan advised, this is not to be art interpretation.

AI provision: If ChatGPT or similar is used, it should be in the form of a dialog with the author or otherwise clearly identified.

Send to: All correspondence should be directed to the special-issue editor, Don Kunze, iPSA, kunze767@gmail.com with “lalangue” in the subject header.

Final Copy: Recommended length of a full essay is 6000 words, with economical use of legal illustrations, but longer works will be accepted. Follow Chicago Manual of Style for punctuation and style issues not covered in the jPSA stylesheet. See sample essay. Files should be in MS-Word  format, using iPSA Styles for all paragraphs and other elements. No blank lines or spaces. No manual formatting. Unformatted or non-iPSA formatted files will be returned without further examination. Authors must clear any uses of copyrighted images.