The Real/Rael of Psychogeography

The Real/Rael of Psychogeography:
Urban Walking as a Method of Ameliorating Castration Anxiety in Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

I will be presenting a paper at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington DC w.b. 1st April 2019 in the Lacanian Landscapes session. Here is the abstract:

Rael is not real, but he is a popular culture representation of a real individual who is a stranger in a new city. As a recent immigrant to New York, Rael has to negotiate the alien space that has suddenly become his home. Part hero, part graffiti artist, part urban explorer, we witness our protagonist traversing the physical landscape of the city and that of his own psyche.

This paper explores the Lacanian concepts of castration anxiety, lack, the Other, and the real, in the context of the album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Genesis, 1974). It examines the anxiety displayed in the character of the story and his attempts to work through this by using the landscape of the city as a vehicle for his own self-therapy.

By analysing Rael’s behaviour in the story, Richardson demonstrates that by taking a psychogeographic approach to the physical space of the city, and the abstract space of his own mind, Rael manages to work his way through the aesthetics of living in New York, as a foreigner, by facing his own troubled past.