Abstract
Proceeding on the assumption that the ‘inner world’ is marked by an imminent catastrophe, the Kleinian tradition within psychoanalysts proposes that human development requires the existence of a benign social medium which is reliable and flexible enough for fear to be contained without being visited upon the other. Such a medium finds representation in a variety of psychological and social spaces, spaces where experience can be held on to and worked upon so that thought might occur. The author seeks to outline a number of basic spatial configurations which occur as a result of the ‘moves' made by the subject in its struggle to obtain a space for experience—some of the configurations facilitate development, some destroy it. It is suggested that such configurations are a characteristic both of internal and of external environments and offer important insights into the constitution of identities and the ordering of the social world.
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