‘A Walk 21/1/35’: a psychiatric-psychoanalytic fragment meets the new walking studies

Abstract

This paper reconstructs a fragment of psychiatric-psychoanalytical geography, interfacing it with the ‘new walking studies’, centring on a walk conducted in 1935 by a man experiencing mental health problems in Glasgow, Scotland. This man, a patient of the psychiatrist Thomas Ferguson Rodger, had mobility problems that rendered walking difficult – prone to stumbling, staggering, wavering – but with the likelihood of these problems being psychosomatic in origin. Through analytic sessions enacting a kind of ‘make-do’ psychoanalysis, the patient reflected on his mobility problems, as when relating his own walking ‘experiment’. Explanations advanced for his difficulties mixed psychoanalytic tropes with a gathering self-awareness of how fraught childhood experiences, had created the frame for an adult existence continually shying away from wider encounters and challenges beyond the domestic sphere. Central here was forward momentum being lost, whether walking or advancing through a life-course, with material and metaphoric senses of being stalled or stuck – spatially, environmentally – constantly entraining one another. This case study is deployed to illustrate claims about the ‘worlding’ of psychoanalysis, and to offer provocations for how such a psychiatric-psychoanalytic geography fragment might be illuminated by work on the cultural geographies of walking.

Psychogeography: Walking through strategy, nature and narrative

“…Others connect with wider cultural, social and political geographies of walking (e.g. Mason 2020; Phelan and Philo, 2020; Stratford et al, 2020) and thence to what Lorimer (2010) called ‘an eclectic array’ of walking studies. The best-known geographical writing on rural walking draws on a phenomenological approach (Wylie, 2002, 2005) that does not situate itself as psychogeography.…”