Chapter 10 The Other Room and Poetic Space

According to Scott Ellidge:

The psychology of Milton’s time was…neat and simple. The brain, seat of mental faculties… consisted of three cells. To the first cell, that of the fancy (literally phantasia or ‘imagination’), the spirits communicated the messages from the five senses. The fancy passed these images on to the second cell, that of reason, which acted upon the image (creating perhaps what we might call an idea) before passing it on to the third cell, that of the faculty of memory.

At night only reason slept. There are two things which strike me particularly about the seventeenth-century brain-mind model: one is the size of the faculty of imagination in relation to reason and memory; and the other is that a physical space, a compartment in the brain, is given to it.

When we imagine things taking place we do so in a space, therefore we have also to imagine the space they take place in. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, envisaged this as a room ‘inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is “in the imagination”…a room which the author bears within himself, and which he has made live with a life that does not exist in life’ (Bachelard 1964:228-9). This passage surprised and encouraged me when I first read it because I had already equated the

imagination, conceived of as a place in the mind, with something I had begun to call the ‘other room’ on the basis of my clinical work. The room described by Bachelard, which ‘the author bears within himself’ (Bachelard 1964:228-9), seemed to me to be the same room. I had adopted the phrase ‘the other room’ as a result of the imagery represented in the dreams and discourse of a particular patient. Once I noticed it, I found it in various forms in the material of a number of patients. I was to meet