This article situates psychoanalysis, urbanity, and precarity apropos of the material, affective, and memory economy of the mutable metropolis marked by visuality, velocity, and violence. Responding to Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, the article examines the interplay of visibility and invisibility in a metropolis and how that is in close and complex correspondence to the politics of precarity and privilege. Drawing on historical as well as recent research in psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory, and cultural studies across various geopolitical settings, this article, through a response to and reading of Mukherjee’s book, aims to articulate and illustrate the unique relevance of literature and aesthetic education in a study of mental health conditions in the (un)seen city. It argues that such psychic and social situations may be uniquely encoded and addressed with ethics and empathy through the cognitive interiority and symbolic instrumentality afforded by the affective and liminal framework of aesthetic activity and fiction.

本文将精神分析、都市性和不稳定与以视觉、速度和暴力为标志的多变大都市的物质、情感和记忆经济联系起来。针对安基·穆克吉的《看不见的城市：城市穷人的精神生活》，本文探讨了大都市中可见性和不可见性的相互作用，以及它如何与不稳定和特权的政治密切而复杂地对应。本文借鉴不同地缘政治背景下心理学、精神分析、认知理论和文化研究的历史和最新研究，通过对穆克吉的书的回应和阅读，旨在阐明和说明文学与美育的独特相关性在一项对（未）见过的城市的心理健康状况的研究中。它认为，这种心理和社会情境可以通过审美活动和小说的情感和阈限框架提供的认知内在性和象征工具性，以伦理和同理心来独特地编码和解决。