A Place for Experience: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Boundary,Identity,and Culture

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.