Place of Mind

What in the world has Psychology to do with Architecture and vice versa?

Joseph Juhász is an environmental psychologist who is professor of architecture and environmental design at the University of Colorado. See full bio

Where does Evil Reside?

What is the evil we all see but won't notice?

Published on November 16, 2009

Where does Evil Re side?

By the close of WWI Freud could see The Other Side of the Lust-Principle. Hardly surprising, in retrospect. There had been a shock. Victoria's Secret was Out. (Come Out, Come Out Wherever You are, and see the young lady that fell from a star.) It was the undieside.

We have had a shock. An electric shock to the genitalia. Painful ain't it. Your hair stands straight up like you've been hit by lightning. Life seems less lustful; there is something creepy and dark on The Other-yonder-Side.

It is Evil.

Conrad called it Heart of Darkness (not The heart of It)--he foresaw the sewage that would spill upriver from the Thames estuary. Her name was The Horror The horror and she dwelt in a whited sepulcher. We also have seen her. We have seen the sepulcher whited. It was physician assisted sui side.

Keep smiling!

What is the evil we all see but won't notice; where does it dwell? In a faar-awaay savage land perhaps? Next door? Home? But isn't it reassuring to know, that as Dorothy Says in her pledge of allegiance--There Is No Place Like Home. Therefore--evil has no dwelling place? It's just a spook or a Spock? The Other Side Of The Rainbow.

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Yet It re sides.

Homeward is to Bound as Longing is to Architecture. Place of Mind-mind the gasp. The whited-out page that is not ghostly white but the intense white of a gunbarrel or rather rifle barrel that has flashed like lightning in a dark dark night--we live in the Love Letter; the Flicker. The tunnel that had been dark dark dark flashing bright as the bullet travels faster than sound--faster than the sound of the explosion--by the time we hear it, splat heart attack.

Geno Side.

Where Freud missed the boat was in identifying that which dwells on the other side of lust as death. It is not The grim reaper. It is something far more folly-full and a lot less Grimm--and it ain't the second law of thermodynamics neither (or Kepler's Law).

Side real Side.

Evil does not dwell in The House of The Dead. In Freud's Essay Dostoyevsky and Parricide, Freud attributes the greatest works of literature to parricide. This would not be death--this would be parricide. An act. The son, the actor. The father, acted upon. The place? A hamlet. Elsinore. The Parry side.

You, decide.