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In psychoanalysis, the psyche is conceived as an entity extended in space (Freud, 1940 [1938]). Apart from extending psychic activity beyond what is conscious, this spatial conception could of course mean the emerging of the psyche from the space of the body: Freud, in a well-known passage from the “Ego and the id,” writes: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (Freud, 1923, p. 26). Also, the id is pictured “as being open at its end to somatic influences, and as there taking up into itself instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in it” (Freud, 1933 [1932], p. 79).
The anchoring of psychic activity in the body is portrayed in the Freudian concept of instinct (Trieb). He writes:
[It]appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. (1915, p. 122)
Winnicott puts it as follows: “I suppose the word psyche … means the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness” (Winnicott 1975, p. 243, Winnicott's italics). This kind of elaborative and integrative work is constituted already in the first experiences of life, when the self is organized having the union with the mother’s body as a starting point (Coblence, 2010). We could say that when we refer to the beginnings of psychic life, we refer to two bodies - the infant’s and the mother’s, initially perceived by the infant as one.
In this way the extension of the psyche derives not only from its bodily origin, but also from being “at the same time itself and a composing part of a dual unity” (Green 2010, p. 1506, my translation).
One could say that the continuity of this extended landscape - the indwelling of the psyche in the soma, according to