ABSTRACT
What can alternative therapies for agoraphobia tell us about the relation between urban anxiety and the ongoing transformation of empty space in our cities' most public sites? The clinical literature shows that agoraphobics, like the general patient population in the United States and Europe, are using alternative therapies at a precipitously increased rate since the 1990s. 1 Alternative treatments for agoraphobia ofen involve attempts to bridge the mind/body split characteristic of Western biomedicine. 2 Achieving this, neurophysiologists and body therapists reinsert the anxious urbanite into public space via therapeutic skills that call forth a psychosomatic self whose sense of consciousness is radically different than that inherited from either the Freudian/psychoanalytic tradition (with its split conscious/unconscious self) or the Western biomedical one (with its mechanistic split between a conscious mind and a nonconscious body). In this chapter I examine several treatments that come under the heading of bioenergetic therapies. 3 These therapies view the agoraphobic's acute anxiety as a problem of kinesthetic knowing, where an embodied self uses nonstoried, nonsymbolic psychomotorial cues to communicate with itself and its environment. Therapists use biofeedback techniques to train patients how to use a subtle, felt sense of bodily awareness to intervene in or disjunctively communicate with the body's autonomic processes, to change heart and breathing rhythms, to modulate hormones, to discharge or reroute energy bound in disruptive patterns. In the clinical literature, bioenergetic awareness is sometimes associated with Asian practices of nonconceptual, mindfulness training. Neurophysiologists who study the relation between emotions and the moving body, on the other hand, speak of a person's proprioceptive capacity to change affective states. 4 In this chapter I am interested in how the increasing popularity of such practices for the agoraphobic are indicative of a changing Western notion of public self. Bioenergetic treatments with success in treating agoraphobia, then, with their new (and also ancient, nonmodern) skills of spatial awareness, should also reveal how the embodied self is being successfully adapted to life in vast, homogenous forms of once dreaded urban space. Afer examining these treatments for what they can tell us about new approaches to spatial consciousness, we consider other kinesthetic-based treatments involving public space, as well as new features of European city design, all of which raise important issues for our broader interest in public space and the public self, its cultural, gendered, and biological relations.
