Houses Move

Daniel Brass

[This paper was presented at the Australian Psychoanalytical Society Members’ Conference on 27 August 2025. It was delivered as part of a panel called ‘Opening Doors’ with Germaine Leece.]

I moved into the house as the pandemic lockdowns were first occurring. It was unexpectedly empty of physical bodies for several months. This continued with bouts of lockdown over the next two years. 

The house has several spaces. Two main rooms – previously bedrooms – and an open area at the back. There is a hallway, a bathroom, a small laundry and small front and back gardens. It isn’t a very remarkable house. The consulting room was and is the front room and initially the open area at the back was an office space with a desk and so on. The former second bedroom did not yet have a name, an identity.

To fill these spaces – the first professional spaces I had had to furnish myself – I bought various items of furniture in a rush. The move had happened quickly with no expectation of Covid lockdowns and none of the furniture was particularly what I wanted. It was simply what was available at the time. But then no one used it at the time. I need not have rushed.

We all remember the eeriness of those early months of the pandemic. There were few cases of Covid, at least locally, but the fear was enormous. In Melbourne for a long time the streets were empty and we were only allowed to leave home for certain reasons.

Gradually the pandemic settled and people came back. At first, they wore face masks, maintained distancing and doused themselves with hand sanitizer. I felt annoyed with Sharon who forgot to bring her mobile phone from the car and so could not ‘check in’ automatically on the QR code but required me to check her in manually. I was anxious about a government officer turning up at the door to audit the ‘CovidSafe Plan’ which I was required to develop and have available for review at any time. The pandemic intruded in so many ways. So much of the time was spent talking about it.

It was a strange time and a strange way to be taking my first steps in independent private practice. Those years – not long ago at all – now feel like a dream. There is an unreal quality to my memories, almost a doubt as to whether those events actually occurred.

The wall had been blank for some time, apart from a few scuff marks from the previous inhabitants which I had not yet had time to paint over. I liked the blank wall and imagined people projecting onto it. But one day I found a painting I liked, a large Aboriginal painting, mainly blue, called ‘Waterholes’. I thought a lot about the painting and about waterholes and about the artist and how her life might have been.

Most people who came into the room immediately noticed the painting which now occupied most of the wall opposite their chair. They would typically examine it closely and more than one person spoke at length about what the painting evoked for them, sometimes sitting silently and looking into it, into the depths of those waterholes, but also gazing into themselves and perhaps me.

Jeff came into the room for the first time since the painting had been hung. He sat down as usual and began talking. He did not comment on the painting. About 20 minutes into the hour, he suddenly stopped in mid-sentence, looking perturbed. He was silent for a while, staring down at the floor, concentrating hard.

Suddenly he said, ‘something is different in this room’. I said nothing because I did not understand what he meant. It did not occur to me that he might mean the painting – why would he mention it now when he wasn’t even looking at it?

He raised his hand and started clicking all around his head, stretching his hand forward and back, his eyes still fixed on the floor. I had no idea what was going on.

Then he said, just as suddenly, ‘It’s that!’ and pointed directly at the painting. ‘It’s new!’ he cried. I felt that there was an accusation.

Jeff He made no comment on the visual appearance of the painting but went on to describe that he had perceived a change in the acoustic of the room. He told me that I would need to hang something else on the opposite wall, otherwise the sound would not be balanced and there needed to be something to soak up the sound. He said that even hanging a coat on the back of the door would be enough.

I thought about how Jeff might be experiencing the world, not primarily visually as I did but through sound and not only particular sounds but the way sound itself operated in space. His experience of the world must be quite different to mine. I thought that he and I must be in very different rooms.

The rooms changed over time from this initial scaffolding. Items were progressively added and some objects were changed. I replaced a cheap Ikea lamp with something I liked more; I hung more pictures. The other spaces in the house also slowly evolved and I had a sense of it taking shape.

But fine cracks were beginning to appear in the wall of the consulting room. At first I could only see the cracks if I looked carefully while wearing my glasses but over time I came to see the cracks clearly even without my glasses. After a while I could hardly see anything except the cracks and the lines from Auden often floated through my mind…

And the crack in the teacup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

I became convinced that everyone else could see the cracks as clearly as I could. I became convinced that the crack heralded the imminent collapse of the house.

I had put up a sign near the door, ‘Please leave the door ajar as you leave’, to try to reduce the impact of people slamming the front door which is continuous with the cracking wall. I suppose I was saying, ‘Please, I am cracking already, don’t hurt me!’ on behalf of the house but maybe also on my own behalf. But people kept slamming the door. Did they not see the sign? Did they not know what ‘ajar’ meant? (One man quipped when he saw the sign that he would try to remember to bring a jar to leave for the door next time.) Or were people reacting against the sign, rebelling, showing their anger? The sign did not solve the problem. The cracks and the cracking would have to be borne.

I asked the handyman who called from time to time to do some work whether it was ok and he promised that he could ‘patch it up’ but this was not reassuring at all. Eventually I got a structural engineer to come and reassure me that the house was not about to fall down.

I had a sense of the house as a house of cards and that even a small movement would cause the whole thing to come down, flop: furniture, painting, books, everything. And yet in this image, the people in the room remained upright, carrying on almost as though nothing had happened.

Perhaps the same request for reassurance was being made of my analyst and others around me in a different language. The engineer delivered the surprising news which now seems obvious to me: houses move.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I had begun psychoanalytic training. It had been a complicated journey and it took me a long time to begin an infant observation. But eventually I did and it was a meaningful and moving experience for me.

The news that houses move coincided with the end of the infant observation. I was starting to explore the possibility of a training case and themes of movement and development – which I had begun to think about differently during and after those hours of observation – were on my mind.

These developments coincided with my decision to have a plasterer repair the cracking.

And then one thing led to another… There was a problem with the plasterer’s paint-matching so the whole room had to be repainted. I decided to remove the doors of the built-in wardrobe to create more room. The hastily-bought couch which I had never particularly liked was replaced. Some bookshelves were brought in but remained empty for a while because I could not decide what books I would want in the consulting room. (This would be another whole paper in itself.)

There was a new room as I began a new phase of my work.

The two people who became my ‘training cases’ noticed the changes and commented on them briefly but other people seemed to be more affected by them. One man returned after a period away and did not like the new couch at all: it was ‘the scratchiest thing ever’ and he regretted the loss of the old couch which he said he had always thought ‘so much nicer’.

Recently, fine cracks have begun to reappear in different places. The cracks in the wall came to seem a ‘sign of life’ in the consulting room and in the house and thus to parallel in my mind the way the people coming and going might also behave in lively and unpredictable ways. There were signs of movement in the room and these seemed to make me more available to noticing and perhaps bearing these signs of life and movement in myself and others. Why did I need to swat away or kill the little flies which would sometimes find their way into the room? What harm would they do? (Germaine and I would share our frustration with these fruit flies – these little creatures who seemed so stubbornly to remind us, perhaps a bit like a memento mori, that life is movement and change.)

The little flies were one sign of life but the people who came were another. I became quite aware of how they were using the space, what they brought and what they would take away. My room was soft and absorbent in contrast with a consulting room which I had recently seen. This other room was all hard surfaces and harsh, white light. It seemed to highlight and reflect rather than absorb. It had never really occurred to me that a therapist’s or analyst’s room would be anything other than soft furnishings and warm light. I seemed to have an idea of the room as fundamentally absorbent but this brought with it an anxiety about what might soak in, what people might leave behind – smells, sweat and spillages were particular worries. How would I ever clean it out? Predictably, I struggled to find a cleaner who was good enough and so reverted to doing the cleaning myself.

I became aware that I had imagined the consulting room as a museum, fixed and unchanging. Edmund Engelman’s photographs of Freud’s rooms in Vienna had been an unconscious model, even though I knew that Freud’s rooms had actually been in a near-constant state of flux with his frequent acquisition of new objects as well as his large and changing practice. What must his patients have brought into those rooms? The photographs from 1938 create an illusion of stillness and immutability, monochrome and purely visual. When I visited the Freud Museum in Vienna not long before my own renovation, I was struck by how alive the rooms felt even without their furniture and how much history seemed to live in them. There were so many ghosts who had been left behind.

The illusion was of creating something perfectly stable and unchanging, constant and perfectly predictable. Maybe I had also expected this of myself: that I, like the room, should be absolutely steady and consistent. That I should never be sick, never have holidays, never bring any dirt into the room, never be in a bad mood. An idea, in short, that my room and I should be unreal, a complete and perfect fantasy.

It was amid my own unexpected renovation that the conversation with Germaine about our rooms began. She was moving into a new room as I was renovating mine. For each of us, a professional identity was in transition and our rooms were being transformed in parallel. It was a free dialogue, without questions but open to association. We ranged across clinical experiences, thoughts about the various objects coming in and out of our rooms and all sorts of writing.

I came to think of my rooms, the plural now more significant. Even though there might be only one physical consulting room, there could be many versions of it in my mind and in others’. Jeff experienced it differently to me in a very immediate way, apparently mainly through sound rather than sight. The room changes with each person who comes into it, both for that person and for me. It is a co-creation co-created at least in each session and perhaps – hopefully – in each moment.

Through our exchange of ideas and experiences, the rooms came more clearly into focus as a stage on which all sorts of dramas might be performed which could be noticed and considered. This was certainly not a new idea but it felt like something discovered for the first time.

I have been and remain interested in having an experience in child analysis but have been unable to imagine it. It has not been represented in my mind and so I have not been able to move forward. There are anxieties which I can discuss but some yet-unknown obstacle has remained.

One day a few months ago I was wandering in a local second-hand furniture shop during an unexpected morning break. I think perhaps I was already pondering unawares another renovation and that was why I found myself there. I saw a particular chest of drawers made in the ‘50s and had a sudden sense that this could serve as storage for the toys of the children I might work with in the future. There might be space for the toys and, in time, for the children. I bought the chest of drawers but they are not yet in the consulting room – I can’t find the right place for them – but they are in the hallway, waiting. I think I am not ready for the drawers to come into the consulting room; I am not ready for such work. The experience with the furniture has helped me understand that and accept it, at least for now.

In the afternoon of the same day, I was speaking to Ashley, an adult whom I have been seeing twice a week for several years.

Ashley described having no memories of playing as a child and struggling to play now. There was a lot to this. Remembering that I had on the shelf behind me a little set of wooden beads bought in a children’s toy shop, and without giving it too much thought, I took the beads from the shelf and walked over, putting them on the table next to Ashley. Without even thinking about it, Ashley began to play. I felt that I had broken some rule but was actually quite glad to have done so. I felt that something had come to life between us. Maybe I too in that moment had been able to play.

I later reflected that the way I had constructed the room, all the ‘toys’ – the books, the vase, the little wooden beads I had taken from the shelf – were all over my side of the room. Ashley had few toys to play with. The room came to feel heavy in my corner and bare in the opposite corner. Ashley’s experience of childhood seemed suddenly to have been recreated in the very design of the room.

Intricate relationships between external and internal space reverberate through these experiences.

There are at least two rooms but also only one. Two people are never in the same room but neither are they in entirely different rooms.

In our conversations, Germaine and I had two sets of experiences – two sets of rooms, two minds – and yet a communication was possible. Initially we thought we would write a single paper together and we considered how this might be possible. How could we communicate the experience of our rooms with one voice? Maybe it would have been possible somehow but this seemed to be a denial of something fundamental to our experiences: the need for the interlocutor, for the other mind. We felt it was important that these two papers should be related but not the same.

The process of coming into the room echoed and continues to echo the experience of coming slowly into – or at least beginning to come into – a new professional identity, yes, but perhaps also a changed identity, another mind. The experience of the other – the other room, the other mind, the other experience – allows something to be noticed and to become available for experience.

I expect that over time my room will fade into the background of my mind and already I find myself feeling ‘comfortable’ in the ‘new’ room, less attentive to its idiosyncracies, although it is now more than two years since the process of renovation started and nearly six years since I moved in, at least physically. How can I continue to come into the room in a new way each time, to remain alive to the experience of the room, perhaps even to welcome the cracking and the fruit flies, the smells, sweat and spillages? These are pressing questions and yet also, somehow, for later. Maybe they cannot be resolved… Maybe asking the question is enough, at least for now…

Paul tells me that for the first time he had a thought as he came through the gate that I would not want to see him today, that I would have been hoping for a last-minute cancellation. There was a theme of things being unwelcoming, which he began to see in the room itself: the Margaret Preston print suddenly looked ‘ugly’ with ‘flowers falling all over the place’ and ‘a hideous black background’; there was so much red in the room which ‘I’ve never noticed before’; the painting above my chair was suddenly ‘spiky and fiery’; the Devil’s Ivy which sits on the table by his chair, the name of which was not lost on him, suddenly had a new significance – he had never commented on it before. And then I was the devil in my ‘lair’, sitting upon my ‘throne’. I thought of Paradise Lost:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind…

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d

To that bad eminence…

I think of the rare occasions when I go to some sort of performance – Paul is a performing artist – and what I project onto the performers, the other audience members and the space. Particularly the importance of the smell…

I am fascinated by the way Paul seems to get access to my own associations. I had remarked to a supervisor that sometimes I felt like I was sitting in a throne, high above and far away. We had discussed the situation at length and what it might mean.

‘But,’ the supervisor said, ‘if you feel that your chair is like a throne, you need to get a new chair’.