This book explores the links between the psyche and the landscape—on the continuum that runs from our mental world inside to our surrounding world outside. Our sense of self is shaped by our environment, while it also helps to create the environment we perceive.

Looking to the fields of psychoanalysis, literature, art history, and neuroaesthetics—taking from both Harold Searles and Donald Winnicott, from both Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke, from both Claude Monet and Gustav Klimt, from both Semir Zeki and V.S. Ramachandran—author Vittorio Lingiardi urges us to articulate the idea of landscape as a place that we seek all over the world, a place that serves as a psychological scaffolding for, and a reminder of, something that’s already inside us. It is a discovery, but also an invention, a return-to-home. Rivers, mountains, oceans, ancient ruins, or small towns: these places inhabit our minds and our dreams, and (like psychic objects) they are embedded in our memory and our unconscious.

This book will appeal to psychoanalysts and therapists of all kinds—and to any reader who wants to understand the deep links between ourselves and our landscape in therapy and in everyday life.