Since Descartes until the second half of nineteenth century the mind has been thought as an unextended substance occupying, no place, no space. This notion prevented for more than two centuries the possibility of any science of mind. It has changed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the philosopher Franz Brentano defined the psychic phenomenons by their intentionality and noticed that they can be investigated thanks to their reminiscences. Freud was a student of Brentano. His ambition was clearly to found a science of mind. For this aim he used Brentano’s concepts of intentionality and reminiscence, but with an extension to the unconscious functioning of the mind. The author unfold the development of the notion of psychic space in Freud’s work, then in Melanie Klein’s and Bion’s work. He illustrates this notion with a clinical case of an adult patient that allows him to stress the concept of non-orientability of the psychic space in some pathological states.

The full text is available in German.