ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic office is somewhat unique in being part workspace, part home, and partly the physical manifestation of psychological space. As a physical entity it contains objects such as a couch, the analyst’s chair, books, and pieces of art, often displayed on walls, shelves, or tabletops. As an ethereal chamber it is associated with the unconscious and with privacy, and it resembles a house of worship or sanctuary to wish and perhaps to pray in – for comfort, clarity, intimacy, happiness, or peace of mind. Certain Jungian analysts conceive of the office as temenos, a Greek word for sacred ground: a place of secure containment, an enclosure, a womb, a protected sphere where one can go deeply inward.
