The Brooklyn Rail

In Shellburne Thurber’s photos, the doctor may be out, but the photographer is in. From 1998 to 2000, Thurber documented about one hundred psychoanalysts’ offices, initially during a month-long stay in Buenos Aires, and then throughout her home region of New England. Rather than capturing actual therapy sessions, Thurber, who lives in Cambridge, took pictures of the spaces, unoccupied, in between appointments. Across her square-format chromogenic prints, layers of time reveal themselves within these spaces: a well-worn leather couch, a waste basket filled with tissues, or a glass of water set on a coaster on a rug. It is undeniable that the interiors, having absorbed potentially decades of repressed fears, conflicts, and desires, are dense with affects.

Published twenty-three years after the project’s completion, Thurber’s recent photobook, Analysis, presents a selection of seventy-six of these interiors, along with insightful essays by curator Lia Gangitano and psychoanalyst Daniel Jacobs. Thurber created the series exactly one century after Sigmund Freud laid out a theory of the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams, and the lengthy period it took her to publish the photographs in book form suggests that images, like dreams and memories, are worth revisiting. In a transcribed interview with fellow photographer Jess T. Dugan, Thurber even proposes that the act of photographing has something in common with the transference and countertransference of psychoanalysis: “It’s like I lose the edges of myself and merge with whatever is in front of me. I become my subject matter in a way; a kind of mind meld.” In the decades since Freud’s theories, psychoanalysis has had a transformative impact on virtually every aspect of private and public life. As both Thurber and Jacobs point out, these photos hark back to 1938 when photojournalist Edmund Engelman took about 150 pictures of Berggasse 19 in Vienna, where Freud lived and saw patients in an office crowded with curated visual-cultural artifacts, days before the family’s escape to London. The Freud family’s transnational trajectory was part of a psychoanalytic diaspora—one that, of course, coincided with the Holocaust, and, as Thurber observes in conversation with Dugan, brought many émigré practitioners to places like Buenos Aires and Boston, some of whose offices she found herself photographing six decades later. Across her series, the collective debt to Freud is made manifest in the devotional posters and busts that populate countless analytic offices.

Thurber clinically titled each picture according to the location and other salient descriptive details, as in Buenos Aires. Green plush analyst’s chair with embroidered antimacassar (1999), or Brookline, MA: Office with blue couch, stucco walls and African mask (2000). As these titles suggest, on a basic level the photos are sociological studies of professional identity, investigating how analysts decorate their offices in ways both formulaic and distinctive. As one leafs through the book, an unsurprising spatial typology emerges: the analyst’s chair, the analysand’s couch, the analytic napkin (for the patient’s head resting against the couch), the tissue box, the waste bin, the packed bookcases, the desk, the clock. (Because the book features just one photograph from each office, not all these elements are always visible.) There is remarkable consistency; one unattractive torchiere floor lamp, for instance, was incredibly popular among Greater Boston’s psychoanalytic community. With their elegant architecture and elaborate curation, many of the offices in Buenos Aires evoke the cultivated aesthetic sensibility of Freud’s Vienna, particularly compared to some of the more modest ones in the suburbs of Boston. Thurber’s decision to shoot the pictures in color further enlivens the offices, distinguishing them from Engelman’s monochromatic photos. As she expresses to Dugan, “I wanted the images to convey the sense that these were active working spaces in the present day.”

Regardless of location, it usually appears that the psychoanalyst attempted to individualize their office, making it more intimate, perhaps, through paintings, posters, statuettes, plants, and oriental carpets (on both the wall and the floor), that together constitute an ideal arena of projection and inquiry, cloistered from the outside world. Thurber’s eye gravitated toward the most curious, discordant, and outlandish details of each office: a ghastly clown print facing the patient, a melancholy painting of a crooked house with picture lights, an inexplicable hovering cupboard, or a neglected toy box with tattered dolls (likely utilized in child or family therapy). Notwithstanding these strange punctuations, Thurber’s focus on spatial configurations seeks to illuminate the “human connection and the energy and potential healing these [psychoanalytic] relationships generate.” Her photos offer compelling proof that furniture, objects, artworks, and architectural details together create tremendously different spaces and experiences of therapy, positing that the arrangement of things shapes social and psychological dynamics, whether healing or disparaging.

Though developments in psychoanalysis and photographic technologies are integral to any historical account of the twentieth century, this precise idiom of the examined life is many decades past its heyday. Such was even the case when Thurber embarked on her series twenty-five years ago, in part to reflect on her own long-term experience in therapy and her responses to her analyst's office. Her photobook undoubtedly has different associations in today’s uneven mental-health landscape, where other forms of therapeutic treatment dominate. While select cities such as Boston and Buenos Aires remain bastions of psychoanalysis, it is by and large a dying art—yet paradoxically one that is in greater demand than ever, and one that continues to elicit considerable interest, as evidenced by the launch of Parapraxis magazine in 2022, a culture magazine that boasts, “Hitching a ride to society’s ongoing return to Sigmund Freud in the twenty-first century.” For the most part, the analytic offices Thurber photographed would probably look the same today, except for the clunky electronic typewriters, computer monitors, and filing cabinets. But with therapy’s increasing migration to virtual platforms that radically alter its traditional spatial and relational dimensions, even the offices themselves are sites of nostalgia, relics of a bygone era.