From multiple artists do great things come. Without Braque would Picasso ever have evolved into the sensation he was? We certainly would have missed a lot of sharp, multi-facetted headache-inducing paintings. What of Gilbert and George? Where would they be in solo careers? And who on earth would want to hire either Hale or Pace individually…come to think of it who would want to hire Hale and Pace full stop?

Headspace is a concept for an exhibition of images and texts exploring a number of psychotherapists, and the consulting rooms where they work. Psychotherapists being the group of professionals charged with ensuring our ‘happiness’ and, ‘normality’ but whose idea of décor is often enough to turn even the most secure person into a quaking prat. The idea is the result of a collaborative process between photographer Nick Cunard a selection of London based psychotherapists and author and veteran therapy recipient, Will Self.

Nick the photographer explains the reasoning behind embarking on such an ethereal challenge.

“Early on in 2003 I began photographing a series of what I refer to as psychotherapeutic environments, that is places and persons connected to the practice of psychotherapy. Notwithstanding psychotherapy's current modishness, and general influence on contemporary society, I was especially interested as a photographer to see what ‘my’ medium, this manipulated, mechanical process rooted in the world of appearances and materiality, would have to say about a practice that by its nature was largely focused on accessing and working with invisible materials”.

The following is an excerpt from Will Self’s piece, “A Room of One’s Own - For an Hour”. The piece recounts Will's experiences of psychotherapists and their consulting rooms during the 1980's and 1990's. This excerpt is accompanied by a taster of Nick’s images, which will show at the Freud museum in November 2004. The show is entitled "Headspace: Photographing Psychotherapeutic Environments".

'In some ways I feel overqualified to write about those strange interiors in which - depending on which view of them you choose to take - psychotherapists either ply their trade, exercise their profession, or perform their art. My own life has been fraught with therapy the way other’s are fraught with religion. Indeed, I could reasonably make the claim that were it not for psychotherapy I might not be here at all to write this. Let me clarify this, just one of the cosmically undermining anecdotes that my mother was subject to retailing, was that while she was pregnant with me she seriously considered having an abortion. She was persuaded not to by her then therapist, the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr Antony Storr.

Alas, after she died in 1988 discovered in her papers two letters from Storr which more or less confirmed the substance of the story, and the clincher came when in 1992 I went and bearded her quondam therapist in his Oxford lair.

I was less interested in the peculiar spin this tale placed on the Oedipus myth that in Storr’s North Oxford home. I don’t think he actually held consultations there, but even so its interior held true to the savage dichotomy I’d come to expect of the spaces tenanted by psychotherapeutic practitioners. On the one hand there were the oral therapists, whose rooms seemed to say: here I am, take me warts, dog-eared paperback, family snaps and all; while on the other there were the anal-ysts, whose antiseptic windowsills and colour-coded spice racks (should you have the misfortune to see them), suggested a relentless pursuit of mental hygiene: no psyche was to be left unirrigated, its studied brown neuroses sluiced clean away.

Storr’s wife had died recently (and he him self has since gone), but there was no hint of widower neglect about the place. You could see the tracks the vacuum cleaner had made on the neat, fitted carpet; the kitchen was a white riot of surfaces; the net curtains hung across the transparent windows like the most decent of draperies. I found it hard to square this pristine home with the healthy respect Storr showed in his writings for the creative ebullience of aberrant states of mind, or the refreshing tonic of solitude. I had hoped my psychic father would prove riotous and unconstrained, instead I found him furtive and enclosed. Which is not to say that he wasn’t also warm, civil and obliging, but for all this the visit unsettled me, plunging me back as it did to the time of my first extended psychoanalysis when I was in my early twenties.

It was with an orthodox Freudian who lived on a pitilessly bland street in Willesden, a pitilessly bland suburb in North West London. Dr S was always neatly turned out in an off-the-peg blue suit, white shirt and dark tie. His consulting room was a converted garage tacked on to the side of his bland semi. Inside it still had the robustly boxy feel of a garage, and the additions of dado and architrave looked like mere garnishes of room, rather than the thing itself. I reclined on a mini-Ottoman covered in a dun rug, Dr S sat behind my head on a black leather office chair. I remember there was a small reproduction of an illustrated Koranic verse hanging above the Ottoman, and a standard lamp with shade angled upwards in the far corner. On the way into Dr S’s consulting room there was a preposterous little vestibule, tricked out with a coat tree, a chair and a magazine rack. Every time I visited Dr S (which was twice weekly), this vestibule would impinge on me. Did he seriously think that one of his analysands was going to arrive early and sit in this dinky waiting area leafing through the month old copy of the Radio Times, which was the sole reading material on offer?

I can remember very little of the work I did with Dr S but I do recall that on one occasion, during a particularly hostile session, he did ask me whether there was anything about either him or his analytic environment that I found particularly enraging. Without any hesitation I said ‘your magazine rack’, and then proceeded to enlarge on this as above. It seemed to me at the time that while other analysands might be having some form of positive transference to the tabula rasa of Dr S’s personality, I had achieved a negative one to his white plastic magazine rack.'