Abstract
I want to explore how we can center architectural education on an approach that honors the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self in architectural decision making. In this paper I take the position that new knowledge is knowledge about the self. I approach psychology rather than technology as a vital and animating force that needs to find its way not only into architectural education but also into the act of designing and architectural ‘know how.’

This discussion draws on the concepts and insights of Jungian psychology, which is highlighted and explained in the endnotes.

Introduction
We hear a great deal about ‘new knowledge,’ and the information society. We have heard about the promise of a new global culture and the convenience of making on-line purchases 24/7. The quantity of information available, and the rate and ease at which it can be moved, points to a technologically based revolution whose impact is the subject of endless speculation. We have no idea where these new tools will take us. Whether you believe technological change is positive or negative, most would agree these changes are unstoppable. In fact, everything points to the idea that whatever changes are taking place represent the first stages of potentially much larger transformations that are affecting and redefining individuals as well as global images of community. The best news may be that ‘new knowledge’ has created an infrastructure capable of sharing information at a rate and scale never before attempted. The ability to access information is not dependent on particular cultures or beliefs; it is tied to the technological sophistication of a machine.

You might assume that with the extraordinary expansion of new sources of information we would see a corresponding increase in our ability to solve problems, but this has not proven to be true.

While information is preferable to ignorance most human beings are not motivated by information alone. Whether it is delivered at the speed of horses or of fiber optic cable, information carries no guarantee of wisdom and holds no certainty of right action. The power to take meaningful action stubbornly resides outside the realm of information, and no amount of technological sophistication can change this.

We find ourselves so entranced and pleased by technology’s promise to make our life easier that increasingly we forget how to live with difficulty and delay. Technology offers to solve problems but has not yet shown an ability to absorb and integrate the psychological richness that underpins and initiates lasting solutions. ] It is probably more than a coincidence that while technology is capable of remarkable revolution and change, human beings seem stubbornly resistant to growth. Often even a personal brush with death cannot change a point of view! The loss of an entire species or eco-system has little effect on our approach to a problem. It has been far easier for us to organize around technological practices and issues of ‘know how’ deal with than the human challenges and problems that we face.

In the city where I live the collapse of a building is an extremely rare event. On the other hand, thoughtless and banal architecture and planning are exceedingly common. We are far more committed to regulating than creating. An important question for architectural education is: How and why we have become so indifferent to the built world? I think our indifference grew quietly out of underestimating the value of human problems and overestimating the importance of technology when solving problems.

A modern individual can barely sort out a day’s worth of modern sense impressions, let alone make space to assimilate what awaits him when he tries to respond to all the levels of media that demand his attention. New information always seems full of promise. But after we have had time to reflect, we realize though it may seem new and though it may look new, and it might claim to be new, after some time the shiny surface tarnishes and the glow of acquisition-excitement fades.

Some would argue that the great pleasure that occurs when we acquire something we desire is not due to the pleasure of acquisition but to the deeper satisfaction that results from the momentary cessation of craving. We are conditioned to believe we are just one piece of new information away from solving our problems, but often our desire for new information is simply generated by an unconscious wish to distract ourselves from and to forget our problems. And the pace and sheer quantity at which we can move, access and store information may have more to do with our need to not feel a connection with all that is difficult and uncomfortable in our lives rather than any substantial or meaningful desire for information, or any intent to learn from problems.

Returning to the architectural focus of this discussion, we can similarly surmise that it may be that this darker, often misleading underbelly of the information society has more to tell us about the effect of new information on architectural know-how than what we have come to see and experience on its shiny but conceptually slippery surface.

I would argue that the underbelly of new knowledge, though largely unconscious, is the key to any discussion of ‘new knowledge.’ This underbelly involves the role self-knowledge plays in decision making. Self-knowledge is the subtle material that enables us to convert anything that happens in our lives into relevance. Self-knowledge is in fact the most valuable and important form of new knowledge because it makes experience meaningful. I want to explore how we can center architectural education on an approach that honors the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self in architectural decision making. (2)

I want to investigate how we can begin to experiment more directly with appreciating architecture and the act of design as a psychological reality. In the field of architectural education this means we need to get into a new habit that integrates, synchronizes and tests new knowledge with self-knowledge. Self-knowledge brings an awareness of the qualities of the conscious and unconscious mind into the act of creation. It recognizes that different laws govern the realm of the psyche and is willing to bring this complexity and richness into the built world. (3) Self-knowledge and ‘new knowledge’ present a potentially dynamic and naturally sustainable approach to architectural ‘know-how.’

The Skilful Architect
Architects offer a unique service. They organize, lead and manage skilled teams, communicate with owners, governments and users and, most significantly, they have been given responsibility for leading the design of the built world. It is true that this responsibility does not fall on their shoulders alone and usually it involves considerable complexity, consultation and debate, but architects are generally seen by society as the primary form-givers for the built world. There are many influential partners in an architectural process that ensure design decisions do not occur in a vacuum, but it is difficult to imagine another profession that has the practical expertise, creative reach, theoretical understanding and the legal jurisdiction of modern architects when it comes to shaping and organizing the built world. This helps explain why it takes so long to become an architect. In the course of one’s training an architect is asked to acquire a new imagination, an architectural imagination. This is the fundamental and unique ingredient in any architectural service. (4)

I want to focus on one particular dimension of the architect’s know-how: the act of design. Why design? Simply because we live in a designed world. The chair you are sitting in, the window you look through, the view outside, beautiful or banal - all of these are designed. Anything that has been ‘built’ has first been designed. Even those rare places that are not designed, such as wilderness areas, owe their continued existence to our capacity to design and legislate for their survival.

The world is now a designed place. According to the World Watch Institute, this decade, for the first time, the majority of the earth’s citizens will live in cities. How can self-knowledge be expected to thrive or survive in the designed environment unless designers create places that value human nature and promote self-knowledge? Self-knowledge was once an understanding closely tied to nature. Human experience was understood to be intimately linked with all forms of creation. Not only were we part of nature, our inner world was considered a “natural” place. By intimately observing the way plants and animals came into being and passed away we gained a deeper understanding of our own comings and goings. Human nature was embedded in a larger experience of nature that not only led to the creation of great archetypal mythologies about the phenomena of the universe but also gave us an unshakable sense of physically belonging to the natural world. Today we no longer live in natural environments and we have lost the training and fullness of awareness that once allowed us to learn from quietly observing phenomena within and outside ourselves. But in the last one hundred years we have acquired a new understanding based on the natural world of the psyche and this offers a universal approach for understanding the value of human problems and their potential relationship with creativity.

Architects at work
Architects often explain their work by saying it has been ‘designed from within.’ Usually this means we are designing from some rational appreciation of the building’s organization. I want to suggest a less intentional explanation. There is a crucial moment in every design process that rests on a different kind of know-how, a relationship we have to our own inner world of psyche. This place of inner know-how, the world of instinct and intuition, the world of subtlety and the felt sense, is not only a complementary counterweight to ’new knowledge,’ it also represents a part of ourselves and the world that needs to be respected and developed.

When we say that we design from within I believe we are pointing to how we design. Our inner know-how, which includes our capacity to imagine, is our greatest undeclared asset. When places and settings are created that uphold this awareness, an undeclared but vital part of us has a place to go that supports deep feelings of belonging in this world. The part of us that is at the undeclared center of architectural creativity is outside most architectural curriculum. It may seem odd to suggest that self-knowledge needs to become an important part of architectural education.

What interests me is the way this undeclared inner world of the designer has always been covert and ignored in architectural education. In the name of progress, schools rush to become ‘wired,’ strive for enhanced global information exchanges and compete for academic excellence as manifested in published papers – all of these being investments in the outer world. However, they ignore the deeper strata of inner longings, needs and desires that consciously and unconsciously influence decision makers and affect decision making. These layers have been ignored for many reasons. They promise less direct benefit. They appear to make decision-making more difficult and time-consuming before they offer improvements. However, on the positive side, they offer a richness that is nearly impossible to quantify. I believe the idea of declaring the role played by the psyche in the creation of the built world as central to making ‘new knowledge’ useful and as the best way to guide ‘architectural know-how.’

The role of problems and new knowledge
Technology and the desire to surmount problems through invention and sharing information is an entirely human approach to solving problems. So ingrained is this approach that it has quietly evolved and taken on the proportions of a spiritual belief.

Yet we find that while technology seeks to end problems, psychological experience shows that an end to problems is neither possible nor desirable. We all move towards happiness and away from difficulties, yet we inevitably become psychologically mature from wrestling with whatever seems to be just beyond our understanding or outside our control. How can this paradox of awareness be brought into the world of know-how when know-how is seen as primarily a technological issue that is dedicated to solving problems? No matter how sophisticated our technology, we cannot escape the gravity of human problems.

The revolution I am imagining is one where we step back and consider that learning how to face problems is potentially more valuable than solving them. We need to believe we can solve problems but we also need to keep in mind that solving them is sometimes less important than understanding what happens to us and inside us when we face difficulties. In short, the how may be more important than the what.

Design and Feeling
I do not want to leave out the complex and troublesome role of feelings in architectural know-how. (5) How can we discuss know-how without feelings? Strictly speaking, feelings tell us whther or not we like or dislike a fact. That feelings initially lead to increased complexity and difficulty is no reason for their dismissal. Our enemy is the banality and unfeeling quality of much of the modern built world. And we must admit that there are very few decisions made about the built world that are actually rational.

The transformation of the built world rests on the capacity of designers to bring this new, subjective know-how into the built world. This is a call to experiment with ways of bringing feelings more consciously into the decision making process. A common question heard in the psychotherapist’s office is, What are feelings? When the person who is seeking help asks this question we know the revolution has begun. Their long-standing investment in the intellect is about to be recalibrated and rebalanced. This seems an extremely important shift in the way we approach the built world and our sense of know-how. Let’s not forget that truth itself may be a value judgment often laden and colored by feelings. We are not about to go back to an age before the rise of intellectual precision. Feelings are important centers of new knowledge because they have a long and reliable history, not only as part of our psychological anatomy but as creative decision-makers. It is not in our interest to neglect the powers of discernment that reside in our feelings. This is probably more significant for our survival than most would admit.

What feelings also offer is a way to incorporate suffering into the act of design. The psychological approach suggests that only by making our suffering conscious can it become meaningful. When we ignore our suffering, it mysteriously becomes projected into the built world and causes far more harm than if we had taken the path of honestly wrestling with it.

The roots of our most stubborn problems are less a matter of intellect, technology or being wired and more an issue of unacknowledged feelings. We have spent centuries developing the intellect and while it’s true we need a healthy intellect that is not all we need. The intellect has nothing to say about value. To assign value we need to trust our feelings. How are we ever going to enjoy the rich harvest of our technological sophistication without accepting the role that feelings play in decision-making?

Architectural Learning
Architectural education is typically arranged in a linear sequence of discreet blocks of information. We begin by assigning small problems and gradually progress to more complex ones. For example, we might begin by understanding what a room is and several years later we are ready to try designing a city. This approach makes some sense; after all, architecture is very complex.

As a more inclusive and productive approach, I wonder whether we might use psychological knowledge to teach architects not only how to solve problems but how we learn about the self and others through facing them. This might have us begin not only with designing a room but learning where our imagination comes from and what it is for. What is the psyche and what role does it play during creativity and problem solving? Where do we get our notions of what a room is? The conscious mind and the unconscious mind are equally involved in shaping and experiencing the built world. What are the roles played by our intuition, sensing, feeling and thinking vehicles as we acquire architectural know-how? This approach sees the transforming power of the built world coming from our ability to design from within and understands the act of design as inseparable from the process of enriching the self.

The inner world of the architect is as significant a factor in shaping the built world as the enormous pool of information available to him or her because it is a source of inner way-finding. The new knowledge I am envisioning is drawn from teaching students to value and develop a strong connection with their architectural instincts.

The Value of the Subjective
One entirely satisfying experience that emerges from teaching architecture is to witness the unlimited enthusiasm of students when they are offered a chance to re-form the built world. Students bring a great deal of hope and love to their work. They also often bring a formidable willingness to struggle and persevere in their search for self-expression.

What follows is a discussion of three keys for the implementation of self-knowledge as new knowledge. I see these steps as an evolution of architectural know-how based on psychology. These steps are centered in the individual and assume a process of constant testing through an iterative process.

Three Keys to Implementing Self-knowledge as New Knowledge are:

A Brief Comment about the Process of Design
The smallest unit of design is probably the act of bringing an image from the mind’s eye into the world. The journey of this image from spirit into matter is the process of design. In this way of understanding things we are constantly involved in an almost alchemical operation of refining the subtle and pliant material of the imagination into the coarser existence of material.

The power of this alchemical discipline has an additional benefit beyond acknowledging the reality of the designer’s inner world. It leads to understanding that authority for creative work is no longer located externally but resides inwardly and rests on one’s knowledge and experience of inner process. In fact, I would argue that most students can only reconcile the world they live in with their own needs and desires when they stop trying to gain approval for what they create. While some might see this as leading to subjectively inspired anarchy or a breakdown in hierarchical structures, I would say it is simply what the individual needs to do in order to act in the world we find ourselves in. The strongest product of the information age is the requirement to be anchored humanely in one’s own needs and desires. This is the beginning of true ‘Know-how’.

This is not a call to self-centeredness but reflects a need to be centered in one’s own ego and truth. What was right thirty years ago may be wrong today. What was wrong yesterday may be right tomorrow. These changes come at us at the speed of new information. How will we ever know what is right or beautiful? There is no convincing global leadership on the significant issues that face our planet. There seem to be fewer and fewer people concerned with beauty. With so little being done in response to melting ice caps, shrinking aquifers and species extinction, we must take matters into our own hearts and minds. Acting on the information that comes from within is becoming more and more important in the information age. It is not an esoteric option. It is a practical way to find a path that is not corrupted by media and the powerful self-interests of others. We need to teach architects that the world is an experiment, whose outcome depends on the hearts and minds of each individual who designs the built world.

Alienation, loneliness and despair are not the afflictions of ‘others.’ They are found throughout society because they exist unacknowledged in the hearts and minds of designers and decision-makers.

The Role of Difficulty

When it comes to architectural education, the most essential elements of know-how have to do with understanding the role of difficulty. Every project, large or small, is eventually complex and difficult. This is not a matter of scale or budget. It is an essential quality of life that arises as naturally as the night follows the day. Of course things never go exactly as we wish, and inevitably much of our work is dealing with internal and external frictions and disturbances that influence our capacity to think and create. The world of emotion and emotional complexity are critical building blocks in any modern project.

My concern about the information society and ‘new knowledge’ is that it leaves less room for the discernment of the emotional world. The world is not black and white. Difficulty is the beginning of color, richness, depth and resonance. And difficulty is the birthplace of modern soul. Recognizing this architecturally means these parts of our self need to find a way of becoming embodied in the built world. We need to learn how to amplify and draw out these inner voices until they become part of our creative process. When architects begin to bring this into their work, the chances grow that vulnerable places will survive. What does difficulty feel like? It is the irreconcilable, the unspeakable, the uncomfortable and the hidden. Difficulty is mysteriously magnetized and always points us to new frontiers of growth. Difficulty is always a door to the messy foundation for new insights and understandings. We are talking about a great, untapped global resource – the capacity and willingness to wrestle with difficulty.

Students may describe their difficult experience to me by saying:

I always suggest they bring their ‘stuckness,’ spinning of wheels and their not knowing directly into their project. I always suggest we use the emotion or blocked expression to unlock, deepen and articulate the design. We are really applying an idea of psychological transformation to the inner world of design. We need to go down into the problem because that’s where its transformative creative energies are located. The sensation of ‘going down’ is the humbling price we must pay to gain the release. The value of difficulty is that it brings the possibility of new understanding and new insight to the inner world of the designer. It is what allows us to deepen our relationship to matter.

The Role of Dreams

Dreams are a source of new knowledge. They present a view from the perspective of the unconscious. They are not filtered through the conscious ego. We are asleep when they happen. All of us dream and many of us remember our dreams but the dream is largely out of favor as a source of new information. (7) Some would say we have nothing to do with the content of dreams, and their content has nothing to do with us. To most people dreams are far less relevant than information sourced from the Internet. This represents a great loss for those who create places and settings in the built world.

Once a student reported a dream to me. “Dana” had been unable to move forward on a project. I suggested she draw as best she could the images from her dream. This led to four vibrant drawings. Dana felt compelled to share the images with her mother and then her uncle, both of whom were Holocaust survivors. She told me that her dream images sparked long-forgotten memories and a great wave of meaningful dialogue unfolded between Dana and her family. As stories and memories were released, she began to feel a clarity and freedom to work on her project. She had started out thinking of designing a Holocaust-related program, but shifted to a centre for adoption. I believe Dana had uncovered, through the architectural images of the dream, a path for herself that both inspired her and healed her creative blocks. As you might imagine, Dana worked passionately on the project and was able to create something she was very satisfied with.

There is no technology involved in remembering our dreams. There is no technology for interpreting our dreams. Understanding a dream is a complex task that involves art, science and compassion in a way that cannot be reduced to a simple formula. One of the great lessons of the dream is that it forces us to admit that an unseen dimension exists and has a voice. It forces us to admit for a moment that there are other kinds of energies at work. The dream is always an attempt to overthrow the ego and bring in a new point of view; this new ego benefits from being incrementally wiser and more tested. Every creative act involves a journey between the conscious and unconscious world.

When I speak about dreaming, I am also talking about the capacity to understand the dream. To make the dream relevant and necessary in our life, we need to be not only interested but also able and skillful enough to gather its meaning. In order to do this we need to have a feel for, and an understanding of, the symbolic world of the dream.(8)

What is remarkable about the symbolic language of the dream is the role played by architecture. Architecture in a dream appears as a setting or the environment for an event. In listening to other people’s dreams we are frequently introduced to a setting at the beginning of the narrative structure. I am in the kitchen. I am at the train station. I am standing on a busy street. Many clients will protest their own dreams. They might say, I only dreamed about that train station because I was there two weeks ago. But they have been to many places over the last few weeks, so why does the psyche select this particular setting for a narrative? What are the unique and important truths to be gleaned from this place? This causes us to ask, What is a train station? What are the associations we have with a train station?

Soon we begin to see that the place of our dreams exists as strongly in our psyche as it does in our everyday world. It certainly lives symbolically. In fact, the entire built world exists as a symbolic place. (9) When we say we are designing a school, we are asking, “What is a school?” But what is the underlying question we are asking? For many centuries a school was a simple idea. But today when we dream about a school, what are we dreaming about? Is it a place of learning or of trauma? Is it a place where people create or is it a place where you’re told what to do, or is it both? All of these associations lead to a particular voice architecturally. And one of the great merits of bringing dreams into an architectural curriculum is that it represents not only new knowledge but also an old truth. We are the products of our ancestors and this will not change. We are more than flesh and blood, and the settings we create exist symbolically and speak to parts of us that are rarely acknowledged. This is a new knowledge that lies as buried in us as in the built world, and we need to give expression to these human instincts and archetypes.

Even in societies where architecture is not considered very important, the psyche will be very tuned into architecture and will bring the built world to life in dreams. And so through the dream architects have the means to create settings for all kinds of events that the psyche will use. Likewise the architect can generate settings that will appear as crucial support for future dreaming.

The dream is not something we can summon; it summons us, and this was always respected and understood by cultures which recognized the basic importance of being in rapport with the natural world. Why not continue this action? And why not see the possibility of this understanding becoming part of the built world? The built world is already full of an enormous variety of nightmares and pleasant places, dream-like and terrifying landscapes, bland and banal habitats. This approach makes conscious the healing power of the dream and reminds us we live in a world where dreaming constitutes a part of our humanity

The Role of the Body

A fundamental psychological truth about the body is that it represents the unconscious. This is because we are usually not conscious of our body until it malfunctions. We are never concerned about consciously monitoring the secretions of our organs, or activating our ability to hear or see; we do these things without conscious intervention. Yet tuning into our body can offer unexpected resources of new knowledge. The body directly and unequivocally experiences all manner of pleasure and comfort. We have lost the ability to interpret these signals, which in turn has made it very difficult for us to create settings and places that exist as catalysts for body-centered knowledge. There are environments that put us to sleep and deaden us, and there are environments that awaken and enliven us. Our body is a lively monitor of the built world if we are sensitive to its signals.(10)

Our body is also a convenient symbol of the natural world and natural process. How can we have a decent relationship with the world of nature when we are so dismissive of our own nature? This is not an issue solved by more information. No wonder we are losing species at an incredible rate. Our definition of know-how favors exporting shoes and making clutch-less transmissions, not saving animals, habitats or human beings. Our belief in the superiority of thinking is so threatened by the sensitivity and wisdom of the body that it tricks us into believing that one must be right and the other wrong. This is not true. We need both. As Jung liked to say, “In the hour of reconciliation great marvels appear.”

Our body offers us a direct gateway to identifying ourselves with matter and with the entire physical world, yet looking at the condition of the world today we must conclude that our beliefs in the exclusively material nature of our existence is in doubt. If we had a genuinely compassionate relationship with our bodies we would not feel free to treat the earth and its resources the way we do. The destruction of earth, air and water through indifference, carelessness, and deliberate exploitation reflects the unconscious way we relate to our own bodies. As a society we are in danger of treating the earth like those who take an interest in their health only after becoming ill. Will this pattern continue? If enough people follow the current fashion it is likely. A creative way to activate a fresh approach to the built world would be to bring to architectural education new lessons in the art of listening to and learning from our body. This is as simple as not ignoring and over-riding exhaustion and learning how to relax and to value down-time. It also includes learning to heed the subtle somatic messages that arise from the body as it directly declares its likes and dislikes as we move through the built world.

The body is a living instrument that is always honestly monitoring itself. It operates incrementally on our awareness. It is unrelenting in its insistence that we acknowledge its material base. It always locates us in the physical world of matter. Like a stone in our shoe, it may not be noticed in the short term but over the course of a long walk that little stone will speak to us. The issue is whether we will learn to pay attention or continue to choose being distracted.

The Round Table
The capacity to move images in the mind’s eye might be the most unique skill the architect possesses. What follows is an active imagination exercise that develops and encourages the power of visualization and imagination in architectural design. (11)

If we are open to the world we are moved. Sometimes we are unconsciously moved. Other times we acknowledge our sources of inspiration. For instance, as a student, I was fascinated by the Etruscans, by the work of Louis Kahn, the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the sculpture of Michelangelo. When I worked, I had these references around me. Working on a project was a constant back and forth between these inspirations.

Then I took a major step forward. I decided to try to invoke a more conscious use of my imagination that accesses the use of reverie, daydream, fantasy and visualization. I closed my eyes, relaxed and imagined that an Etruscan, Michelangelo, T.S. Eliot and Louis Kahn were sitting at a round table discussing the architectural problem I was considering. In my mind I asked the four of them to have a dialogue about the problem I faced. I listened to their imagined conversation and closely watched what their drawing looked like and recorded everything I inwardly saw and heard. I let them do the work for me. I was ‘online’ with my own imagination, using the creative abundance of the unconscious consciously.

I quickly found myself with a surplus of ideas and images to work with. Today, based on principles of guided imagination, I teach these exercises as a way to develop skill sets that bring the inner world to the built world. We are all able to imagine and we are inspired by what moves us. This approach allows us to bring what moves us into the world. It is an accessible and simple approach that supports individual expression and rests on a naturally shared platform of imagination and experience. As architects, this process is very close to what we are doing when we design.


Know-how and Shadow
Know-how is sabotaged by what inspires it: a desire for perfection. Its ideal and its goal is to transform an idea into something real. However, what know-how really needs is an experience of the underbelly of perfection, which is the shadow. Architecturally we know that a shadow gives a surface depth. Similarly, human beings acquire psychological depth by acknowledging their shadow. (12) The personality that admits to shadow admits to darkness and difficulty and thereby gains depth and substance. Admitting to difficulty and chewing on these unwanted problems fundamentally alters our approach to difficulty. We acquire new ways of seeing the whole picture if we admit to these otherwise unwanted characteristics that exist in the shadow. Our very acceptance of shadow gives us insight and allows us to choose understanding.

The danger with one-sided thinking is that it ignores these shadow traits and they become projected. The exact mechanism of shadow projection is not easily measured or found but we can easily identify the product of this phenomenon. This is my own way of understanding how our modern know-how does not protect us from declaring war on the most harmless things. Know-how needs to get familiar with its own unconscious or we will continue to project our unwanted and unacknowledged problems into the built world. The greatest threat to the world comes from this undigested dimension of know-how. The underbelly of know-how, our unconscious, felt experience, is the most menacing danger that every decision-maker needs to wrestle with and eventually draw out so that it can be safely transformed and transcribed into the built world.(13)

Are we ready to understand the built world as a direct and honest portrait of our ability to reconcile spirit and matter, psychology and technology? The center of gravity for architectural know-how will more and more be the ability to wrestle with problems that come from designing from within.

An alternative know-how
The purpose of education is two-fold: the evolution of self-knowledge and the acquisition of know-how. In other words, what percentage of a curriculum deserves to be devoted to ‘new knowledge’ and how will this be balanced by the need for relevant know-how? The question I want to ask is: How can these two streams be brought together? How can we bring self-knowledge to problem solving?

Keys:

We need an architectural curriculum that encourages us to design from within and does not separate transformation and creativity. It is not surprising that we gain a world that is unsustainable when self-knowledge and technological know-how are split apart

The problems facing the built world are enormous and all of them directly reflect our beliefs about spirit into matter. We do not suffer from a lack of technological know-how. We suffer from an inability to honestly accept psychological problems as being equal in importance to materially based or technological ones. Know-how needs to be deeply rooted in the human experience, which includes the turmoil and the bliss of the psyche. We must no longer design only for the built world. We now must design for the inner world, the outer world and the underworld.

I suspect we secretly know that to bring deeper levels of feeling to decision-making will cause enormous disruption and discomfort, but I suspect we also know that we are now at the point where we face equally grave consequences for avoiding this.

Conclusion
The problem of evil is not that it exists but that we fear it is greater than us. The same may be said of technology. We need not fear technology. After all, the desire to invent and create has served us well and we must hope this continues. The danger of technology lies in the ease with which it helps us forget we are human beings. This is hardly the fault of machines.

When architectural students are shown how to bring the reality of their body, dreams and shadow into their creative work, they instinctively know what technology is for. They instinctively understand that transformation and the fate of society rests on human voices, human relatedness and a longing to be included and touched by something real in the built world. This shift reminds us that a meaningful built world is underpinned by the depth, luminosity and resonance of our inner world. Acquiring psychological know-how allows us to wrestle with technology where it is born and where imagination has its most evocative call: inside our own hearts and minds.

Andrew Levitt teaches design at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and is a psychotherapist in private practice in Toronto, where he lives with his wife. He has recently finished writing a book about the creative relationship between our inner world and the built world.

mailto:Alevit6071@rogers.com
 

Notes and References:

The psychological terms I use in this paper are drawn from the work of C.G. Jung. It is outside the scope of this paper to discuss these terms fully, but the following references and comments are intended to serve those wishing to make a more thorough study of this material. All references, except where noted, are to C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Vols. 1-20, R.F.C. Hull, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).

1. Analytical Psychology and Weltanshauung in: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 737.

2. Consciousness is considered the function or activity that maintains the relationship of psychic contents to the ego. “The reason why consciousness exists, and why there is an urge to widen and deepen it, is very simple: without consciousness things go less well.” “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” CW 8, par. 695.
According to Jung, the unconscious is the sum total of all psychic phenomena that lack the quality of consciousness. “The unconscious processes that compensate the conscious ego contain all those elements that are necessary for the self-regulation of the psyche as a whole.” “General Description of Types,” CW 6, par. 573. For a thorough and scholarly review of the evolution of our understanding of the unconscious, particularly through the Modern period, see Henri. F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970).

3. Jung’s definition of the psyche is the totality of all psychic processes, both conscious and unconscious. “It is highly sensible ... to make clear the primacy of the psyche, for that is the one thing which life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, in the midst of all these ‘given’ things, to wonder by whom they are ‘given’ ... we (need to) learn that the giver of all things dwells within us. This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary, indeed vital, for us to know it.” “Psychological Factors in Human Behavior,” CW 11, par. 762.

4. The following thoughts on imagination are from the James Hillman Lectures (Eranos 2), The Thoughts of the Heart (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1981). “The heart is the seat of imagination, that imagination is the authentic voice of the heart” (p. 2 “When we fall in love, we begin to imagine; and when we begin to imagine, we fall in love” (p. 5).

5. According to Jung, feeling is the psychological function that evaluates what something or someone is worth. It is termed rational because it works through judgments and evaluations. “Feeling is distinguished from affect by the fact that it produces no perceptible physical innervations, i.e., neither more nor less than an ordinary thinking process.” “Definitions,” CW 6, par. 725. “A feeling is as indisputable reality as the existence of an idea.” “The Psychology of the Transference,” CW 16, par. 151.

6. Jung’s major contribution to the psychology of difficulty and conflict was his belief that it had a purpose in the self-regulation of the psyche. He believed that if the tension between opposites can be held in consciousness, then something would happen internally to resolve the conflict or difficulty. This “solution,” essentially something irrational and otherwise unforeseeable, generally appears as a new creative attitude with one’s self and the outer world. Jung called this the tertium non datur or transcendent function. “The Transcendent Function,” CW 8, par. 145.
Marie Louise von Franz nicely sums up the psychological process: “Jung has said to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, which ever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, ‘Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of it,’ the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally…the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.” Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales (New York: Spring Publications, 1970), sec. VI, p. 4.
For a Jungian perspective on the role of difficulty and conflict in the Old and New Testament, see J. Sanford, The Man Who Wrestled with God (New York: Paulist Press, 1974).

7. Jung agreed with Freud that dreams have a wish-fulfilling and sleep-preserving function, but focused on their symbolic content and their compensatory role in the self-regulation of the psyche. “Dreams,” CW 8, par. 545.

8. For a Jungian approach to working with dreams and, in particular, issues of amplifying symbols, see Robert Johnson, Inner Work (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1968). For examples of Jungian dream interpretation, including the role of symbols in the development of the psyche, see Marie Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream (Boston: Shambhala, 1994).

9. Jung considered symbols the best possible expression for something unknown. “A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we never stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.” “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams,” CW 18 (par. 482). For a comprehensive classification of mythic symbols, see Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). For a discussion of the relationship between the psyche and the “symbolic life,” see E. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), p.117.

10. The difficulty and paradox of discussing the intelligence of the body lies in the fact that this intelligence is not text-based and is therefore considered inferior by our thinking function, which our ego habitually aligns with when making decisions. Those who consciously experience their body through athletics, dance or illness may directly make contact with the decision-making capacity of the body. A psychological approach to the body has the integration of this wisdom as one of its goals. “The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but the solar plexus, and creates specimens for the physician’s consulting room, or disturbs the brains of the politicians and journalists who then unwittingly unleash mental epidemics.” Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 113.
For the role of the body in the process of psychological transformation, see Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1985). For a study of the connection between the psyche and the body, see Judith Harris, Jung and Yoga (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2001).

11. Active Imagination was invented by Jung as a way of assimilating unconscious contents through some form of self-expression. The objective of active imagination is to give voice to a side of the personality not usually heard, thereby creating a line of communication between the conscious and unconscious. “We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this actually is an art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things.” C.G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Wilhelm Richard, trans., (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1962), p. 93. For a Jungian approach to working with Active Imagination see Johnson, Inner Work, chapter 3.

12. Shadow is a Jungian term that describes a hidden or unconscious aspect of one’s self, either good or bad, which the ego has repressed or not recognized. “The Shadow,” CW 9, par. 14. For an excellent survey of contemporary psychological issues concerning shadow, see C. Zweig & J. Abrams, eds., Meeting the Shadow (New York: Penguin Books, 1990). For a guide to the psychological process of working with one’s own shadows, see Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow(New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

13. Projection is a Jungian term that describes an autonomic process whereby the content of one’s own unconscious is perceived to be in others. “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradiction, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.” CW vol. 9 (II), par. 126. For a detailed discussion of the projection of the shadow, see Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of CG Jung (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 109. For a discussion of the results of mass projection, see C.G. Jung, “The Psychology of Nazism,” R.F.C. Hull, trans., in Essays on Contemporary Events (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).