The city of Simmel, the city of men

Abstract

The following text presents an interpretation of The Metropolis and Mental Life in light of the theory of psychoanalysis. The central point of this interpretation is the Simmel’s extraordinary intuition regarding the interrelation between city and psychic. The text considers that this relation allows the association of Simmel’s feeling of (un)rooting to the Freudian notion of abandonment. It is assumed that the city works as a psychic function of substitutive nature, from where the subjective ways of the city derive. The conclusion states that the city, even in its material sense, is not apart from the subject, but is rather a phenomenon that is marked by the subjectivity which characterizes everything that is human.