Research & Reading
Want to learn more about the psychology of setting? There is a wealth of academic and lay reference materials available for your use. The references below are from some of the strongest researchers in this field, and/or show how settings interact with other psychological disciplines.
GENERAL:
The Poetics of Space
by Gaston Bachelard
“…setting is more than scene in works of art, that it is often the armature around which the work revolves. He elevates setting to its rightful place alongside character and plot. Poetics of Space is a prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced and enchanted significances.” - John Stilgoe of Harvard University
House As a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home
by Clare Cooper Marcus
“We create our immediate environment and then contemplate it and are worked by it. We find ourselves mirrored in it, see what had been not yet visible, and integrate the reflection back into our sense of self.” - Clare Cooper Marcus
The Western Guide to Feng Shui: Room by Room
by Terah Kathryn Collins
A good Feng Shui how to book. She has written a number of Feng Shui books.
The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside
by Tony Hiss
“We let the layout of a place give us an advance reading on such things as whether we can linger there or need to keep moving, how relaxed we’ll be if we stay, and even whether we feel comfortable about talking to people already there.” - Tony Hiss
Feng Shui With What You Have: Maximum Harmony, Minimum Effort
by Connie Spruill and Sylvia Watson
The authors are proponents of Pyramid School Feng Shui, which incorporates both Eastern and Western knowledge systems. They note that “the core concepts [of all forms of Feng Shui] teach us about being integrated in the world we inhabit, living in sync with nature, and fully utilizing our senses. This is how feng shui brings about a new awareness of our surroundings and prepares us to create spaces that truly benefit and support us physically, spiritually, and emotionally.” - C. Spruill & S. Watson
The book is full of practical affordable tips. It is an excellent Feng Shui reference book.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
by Carl Jung
“Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of the unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.” - Carl Jung
Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places
by Toby Israel
The author interviews designers and does an ‘environmental biography’ to formulate links between the homes and places from their childhoods to their adult choices of homes, location and interior design.
The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell
by Rachel Herz
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
by Daniel J. Levitin
Rock musician/studio producer turned cognitive neuroscientist tells us how our brains interpret music, why we became emotionally attached to the music we heard as teenagers, and much more.
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
by Janine M. Benyus
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
by Juhani Pallasmaa
The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions (P.S.)
by Winifred Gallagher
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
by Donald A. Norman
Total I Ching: Myths for Change
by Stephen Karcher
Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
by Yi-Fu Tuan.
Kinds of Power
by James Hillman
We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–And the World’s Getting Worse
by James Hillman
“It took the last several decades for therapy to learn that body is psyche, that what body does, how it moves, what it senses is psyche. More recently, therapy is learning that the psyche exists wholly in relational systems. It’s not a free radical, a monad, self-determined. The next step to realize that the city, where the body lives and moves, and where the relational network is woven, is also psyche. It includes the ground swells that ebb and flow through the city, the fashions, language, biases, choreographies that rule your waking soul as much [as] the images ruling your soul.” - James Hillman
One of the problems with psychotherapy in Hillman’s view is the lack of verbal perspicacity in psychotherapy. “Our usual psychological language fails the precision of the image. Our language also fails the emotion. Whereas art in images . . . presents each emotion precisely. Here image-speech takes precedence over emotion-speech.” - James Hillman
“It’s not enough to be in a tastefully decorated room. White bread therapy has all along secured itself in well-appointed consulting rooms, with comfortable chairs and artistic ornamentation. “Good” design can lead to the mediocrity of normal adaptation rather than into the depths of soul. ‘Depth’ which means death and demons and dirt and darkness and disorder and a lot of other industrial strength d words familiar to therapy, like dysfunctional, disease, defense, distortion, drives, drugs, and despair.” - James Hillman
A Blue Fire
by James Hillman
Hillman invites psychotherapy to attend to the world of things—things that are empty, wrong, ugly, or broken—by moving with the heart toward the world. He contends that if the analyst became “thing conscious,” they would awaken to how uncomfortable they are in their poorly built, “chemicalized” chair. He sees our ordinary rooms as the places in which soul change can take place if we attend to these places “where these interior faculties of the human mind begin.”
The Hidden Dimension
by T. Edward Hall
As anthropologist Edward T. Hall asserted, “No matter what happens in the world of human beings, it happens in a spatial setting.”
“Man’s sense of space is closely related to his sense of self, which is an intimate transaction with his environment. Aspects of his self may be either inhibited or encouraged to develop by his environment.” - T. Edward Hall
The Feng Shui House Book: Change Your Home, Transform Your Life
by Gina Lazenby
This is a good Feng Shui primer rich with pictures and suggestions of how to use Feng Shui in your home.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
Home Enlightenment: Create a Nurturing, Healthy, and Toxin-Free Home
by Annie B. Bond
A wonderful ‘green’ living manual chock full of information and useful resources [544 pages].
ACADEMIC:
Aiello, J. R. (1987). Human spatial behavior. In D. Stokols & I. Altman (Eds.), The handbook of environmental psychology (pp. 389-504). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Anthony, K. H., & Watkins, N. J. (2002). Exploring pathology: Relationships between clinical and environmental psychology. In R. Bechtel & A. Churchman (Eds.), Handbook of environmental psychology (pp. 129-146). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Brian Little, Personality and Environment, Handbook of Environmental Psychology, 1987
Coffee, K. (2000a). Analyze this: What a quartet of psychotherapy offices disclose about their occupants. Interiors, 159(12), 64-68.
Gosling, S., Sei, J., Mannarelli, T., & Sapient, M. (2002). A room with a cue: Personality judgments based on offices and bedrooms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(3), 379-398
Hwangbo, A. B. (2002). An alternative tradition in architecture: Conceptions in feng shui and its continuous tradition. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 19(2), 110-130.
Kasmar, J. V., Griffin, W. V., & Mauritzen, J. H. (1986). Effect of environmental surroundings on outpatients’ mood and perception of psychiatrists. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 32(2), 223-226.
Kittelson, M. L. (1995). The acoustic vessel. In M. Stein (Ed.), The interactive field in analysis (Vol. 1) (pp. 89-105). Wilmette, IL: Chiron.
Langs, R., & Stone, L. (1980). The therapeutic experience and its setting: A clinical dialogue. New York: Jason Aronson.
Low, S. M., & Lawrence-Zuniga, D. (2003). <The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (Blackwell Readers in Anthropology)
March, A. L. (1968). An appreciation of Chinese geomancy. The Journal of Asian Studies, 27(2), 253-267.
Oliver, J. D. (1996, February 29). Rooms to please any id. New York Times, pp. C1, 6.
Peck, R. L. (1996). The office as therapy assistant. Behavioral Health Management, 16(4), 36-39.
Stein, M. (1992). Power, shamanism, and maieutics. In M. Stein & N. Schwartz-Salant (Eds.), Transference/countertransference (pp. 67-87). Wilmette IL: Chiron Publications.
Synder, W., & McCollum, E. E. (1999). Their home is their castle: Learning to do in-home family therapy. Family Process, 38(2), 229-242.
Teather, E. K., & Shing Chow, C. (2000). The geographer and the feng shui practitioner: So close and yet so far apart? Australian Geographer, 13(3), 309-332.