ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the psychoanalytic theory that underpins the account, and applies it to earliest experiences of architecture—the 'original architectural event'—and outlines its repercussions for subsequent relationships with the built environment. It explores how identity is constructed through the subject's bodily interactions with the built environment and its architectural objects. The chapter deals with the body's involvement in the three phases of the architectural event as it interacts with the architectural object through a process of mimetic identification. It explains how the subject incorporates the feature as an elusive and uncanny sense of otherness alongside its fortifying, structural character in their identification with the architectural object. The event that leads the subject to perceive these features not as qualities of an object that is independent and external to him or her, but as part and parcel of themselves. The architectural event is an event that unfolds unconsciously in the subject's interaction with the material forms of the building.
