16 The concept of Internal World: Past, Present, and Future

I now want to investigate what I mean by psychic dimensionality. Although I have introduced some ideas in the introductory chapters I want to repeat them here but to add greater detail and depth.

Both the experience of the body and the external world appear to us spatially three-dimensionally with the addition of the time dimension. They constitute the substratum whence psychical processes develop. We, therefore, start from the hypothesis which is almost a certainty, that everything which is psychical in us expresses itself at some time by means of three-dimensional space plus time. Note that this assertion does not say that psychical phenomena develop in space-time but only that they are expressed by means of space-time. In fact, following Freud, we have repeatedly suggested that some psychical manifestations are both atemporal and aspatial. Others can be understood in terms of correspondence with a space of a number of dimensions higher than three, perhaps up to an infinite number of dimensions in certain cases. The latter space would be a mathematical way, asymmetrical or heterogenic, of course, of expressing an experience of indivisible unity, which is atemporal and aspatial. This would be similar to the notion of mathematical infinite, which is an asymmetrical way of expressing indivisibility.

Said in a slightly different way: psychical phenomena can be understood in terms of a space of dimensions higher than three; but they are expressed by three-dimensional means. How can this be done? We have already developed this argument several times in the