ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections between unconscious and space; architecture and dream; between container and contained. Gordon Lawrence, when immersed in the process of developing social dreaming, wrote extensively on the concept of the infinite. Lawrence had to contact the mental space of the unknown, free from pre-conceptions in order to find or discover a new way of thinking about dreaming, different from the penumbra of associations related to the already known dream-work of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, anthropology, systemic studies contributed to the formulation of Lawrence’s initial hypothesis about social dreaming and supported the intuition that it is a tool of cultural enquiry for illuminating the unconscious processes in systems and in society. In the department examined, there were sound motivations for a merger, but unfortunately it did also come with the characteristic traits of a disrupted and psychically unmanaged workplace.
