Intimate rooms. The homes of psychoanalysis

The home is a central image in dreams and in the representations of our lives because it is linked to humans’ most basic and identity-related needs: roots, belonging, containment. Freud wrote that “the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, one’s first dwelling place, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease”. It is the space of intimacy, of privacy, yet it is also precisely behind the façade of this ‘safe place’ that the arcane and the unknown lie. Civitarese and Boffito use contemporary psychoanalysis to explore the most secret rooms of the mind’s house. Ignoring the warning ‘Don’t open that door!’, they enter the kitchens, playrooms, nurseries, closets, basements and attics of our selves. Intimate rooms that all come to life in the analyst’s room.