Physical Environment and Culture Analysis

Abstract

People’s lives are led in social and physical environments. Psychology and other disciplines have paid much attention to people’s social experiences, such as those with mothers, fathers, siblings, extended family, peers at school, neighbors, and other social entities. Many interpersonal processes have been addressed and analyzed in psychology, such as object-relations, attachment, separation-individuation, mirroring, identification, projection, introjection, transference, empathy, and others. Interestingly, the only term in psychology that addresses the relationship with the physical environment is transitional object, which was coined by Donald Winnicott (1951). Psychology has neglected the significance of the physical environment, such as ecology, plants, houses, clothes, furniture, gifts, and other components of people’s physical environment, despite the fact that much of human motivation and frustration is associated with materialistic and physical components.