Divine Space: Contemplating the Object Behind A religious Patient's Spatial Metaphor

God and the psyche look at each other as if they were mirror reflections of each other.

According to semiotician Julia Kristeva's inspired directive, the hermeneutic task in approaching the biblical text is “to interpret it, of course, but also to let it carve out a space for our own fantasies and interpretive delirium” (, p. 119, emphasis added). Unknowingly hewing to Kristeva's recommendation, a religiously devout Jewish analysand, reprising the intersubjective achievements of 7 long years of psychoanalysis, drew a beautiful analogy between the developmental carving out of usable psychic space and the biblical concept of God as makom (lit., “space” or “place”). She drew this term from the main theme of the mysterious exchange between Moses and God depicted in the well-known “cleft in the rock” episode of Exodus 33:13-23. Although a variety of metaphors of different qualities surfaced at points throughout the patient's analysis, her selection of this biblical spatial metaphor, and the manner in which she used it, stood out in bold relief against the background of other significant issues that preoccupied the patient at the time. As we shall see, in fact, not only did the biblical metaphor illustrate the patient's narrative, the patient's narrative in turn illuminated and effectively recast the meaning of the metaphor in a way that transcended her own personal text, revealing novel conceptualizations that may be of universal relevance.

As one would anticipate when the associative processes are operating fluently, the patient did not simply “deposit” her metaphor, as she very well would have during earlier times. It was striking how she was able to elaborate and develop her metaphor during the course of several sessions, to our mutual satisfaction, relying essentially on her own imputations and inferences, while making only the briefest reference to traditional rabbinic