Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'street' operates less as a topographical term than as a psychosocial threshold — the liminal zone where inner states collide with collective reality, where psychopathology becomes legible in public space, and where the consequences of cultural policies are inscribed on living bodies. The range of positions is considerable. Abraham's classical psychoanalytic reading treats 'street anxiety' (Strassenangst) as a specific neurotic formation, linking locomotor dread to suppressed eroticism and the unconscious pleasure of movement — a rigorously clinical framing. Jung, by contrast, deploys the street as a scene of social performance and persona-management: what one wears on the street signals conformity to collective expectation, making the street the arena of the social mask. In the addiction literature — particularly Hari and Maté — the street becomes a site of devastation and, paradoxically, of political awakening: the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the corners of New York City figure as theaters of the drug war's human cost and, eventually, of organized resistance. Kandel's memoir treats the named street as a marker of biographical memory and cultural belonging. Across these positions, 'street' consistently indexes the tension between inner life and collective order, between vulnerability and exposure, between marginalization and assertion.
In the library
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there must be a specific factor present in the sexual constitution of neurotics who suffer from locomotor anxiety — a factor which does not affect all neurotics alike, and which, combined with other psychosexual factors of the kind described above, favours the appearance of street anxiety
Abraham identifies 'street anxiety' as a discrete clinical entity rooted in the sexual constitution of the neurotic, arguing that locomotor dread on public thoroughfares is overdetermined by suppressed erotic pleasure in movement and the fantasy of dancing.
Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis
A man wears his hat in the street, where other people see him, when he is respectable, which means when he can be seen. Therefore he is presentable.
Jung uses the street as the definitive arena of social visibility and persona conformity, where collective norms dictate comportment and deviation marks one as deviant or mad.
Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
I wanted to see how the dynamics set in train by these men so long ago were playing out today, not only in academic papers or in polemics about the drug war but on the actual street corners of New York City, where Arnold fought and Billie died.
Hari positions the street corner as the empirical ground where abstract drug-war history becomes embodied human tragedy, insisting on direct encounter over archival distance.
Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015thesis
There is an insistent rhythmic chant on the streets as you walk past dealers: 'Rock? Rock?' 'Powder?' 'Rock? Rock?' 'Powder?' Women with hollow faces and painted red lips pace nervously, offering a date to passing cars.
Hari renders the street of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside as a sensory landscape of addiction's most visible suffering, where the drug economy's rhythms are literally audible and bodily degradation is publicly displayed.
Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
they put in place another way to help him. They employed street teams of psychologists to fan out across the country to look in all the old ruined houses and broken crannies where the most hard-core addicts live, and to offer them help.
Hari describes the Portuguese decriminalization model's use of outreach 'street teams' as a therapeutic counter-geography to prohibition, bringing care into the spaces of deepest marginalization.
Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
'I won't ask anybody for help on the street because if they help you, you owe them your goddamn life. Even if you pay them back, they still think you owe them.'
Maté captures the street economy of obligation and exploitation that structures survival for addicts in the Downtown Eastside, where mutual aid is experienced as a debt-trap rather than solidarity.
Maté, Gabor, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting
they pumped his stomach and put him back on the street.
Hari uses the clinical act of 'putting back on the street' to expose the system's fundamental indifference to the welfare of young offenders, the street functioning here as the default space of abandonment.
Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
He remembered a fifteen-year-old girl on the streets, and shook his head. They're not ma—
Hari records Mayor Owen's epiphanic encounter with the streets of the Downtown Eastside as the moment political abstraction yields to human recognition, transforming policy through direct witness.
Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
My father had established his toy store in the Eighteenth District on the Kutschkergasse, a lively street that also contained a produce market, the Kutschker Market.
Kandel invokes the named Viennese street as a container of childhood memory and cultural identity, the street serving as a biographical anchor for the formation of a scientific mind in a specific social world.
Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006aside
HISTORIC DOWNTOWN TOUR OF JUÁREZ, it said, directing me to the sites to that were famous when this was one of the great party towns of North America.
Hari uses the palimpsestic streets of Ciudad Juárez — tourist signage overlaid with missing-persons posters — to figure the drug war's erasure of a city's living culture.
Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015aside