Psychoanalysis and identity in architecture

Architecture at its best is an expression and reflection of the human psyche, in which cultural identity plays an important role. In order to understand better the role that architecture plays in changing concepts of cultural identity, it is helpful to understand better the role that cultural identity plays in the human psyche. Cultural identity is given by language, and an important part of the psyche is composed of the laws, relations and customs of a cultural identity as given by language, what Jacques Lacan called the Symbolic Ego, as given by the Other, the linguistic matrix, which is what forms the unconscious. The Imaginary Ego, the independent bodily and sense experience of the individual, is absorbed into the Symbolic Ego, the use of language, as a result of the Mirror Stage, in the childhood of an individual, though not without internal conflict. When a child sees its image in a mirror for the first time, its physical self-identity is reified as a body image, which becomes a signifier in the language of self-identity. After the Mirror Stage, it is impossible to have an immediate sense experience without the intervention of language. Sense experience is filtered through language and signification, including the experience of architecture.