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On pain and architecture

During a lecture of his seventh seminar in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis of 1959, Lacan made a brief “digression” into the myth of Daphne. The nymph’s petrification presented the psychoanalyst with an example of human behavior in moments of inescapable, mortifying pain. In an agonizing gesture, the human body instantly freezes, inanimates itself from within into a monument of stone, erect and fixed, reminiscent of the “tortured” forms of Baroque buildings:

“Isn’t something of this suggested to us by the insight of the poets in that myth of Daphne transformed into a tree under the pressure of a pain from which she cannot flee? Isn’t it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petrified pain? Doesn’t what we do in the realm of stone suggest this? To the extent that we don’t let it roll, but erect it, and make of it something fixed, isn’t there in architecture itself a kind of actualization of pain – n’y a-t-il pas dans l’architecture elle-même la présentification dela douleur?”

Spyros Papapetros, Daphne’s legacy. Architecture, psychoanalysis and petrification in Lacan and Dalí, in Surrealism and Architecture, edited by Thomas Mical, Routledge, 2005