Tracking the City's Psyche: Terrapsychologizing in San Francisco

Abstract

Abstract

As an elaboration of ecopsychology,

terrapsychology explores how earthly presences—of locales, their creatures, their materials, their natural sources and human modifications—sculpt our ideas, our habits, our relationships, and even our cultures and sense of self. Whether we know it or not, we speak, walk, and breathe the discourse of world, terrain, and place all the time, their jagged ridges roughening our smooth speeches, their rivers sweeping our ideas downstream, their skyscrapers beckoning us to heights of fame and hubris, their polluted harbors darkening our moods, their sanctuaries offering us islands of precious sanity.

For terrapsychology, geology, geography, ecology, and environment

are psychology, as we can see on a tour of where South of Market (SoMa) intersects Civic Center, San Francisco. By taking the reader along to see the presence, character, or “soul” of SoMa, this essay offers an example of how to know a place better by interpreting its structures, myths, images, and recurring themes much like we can interpret the symbols in our symptoms, fantasies, and dreams.