Chapter 10 Space (s) and Time

In 1970, Serge Viderman published La construction de l’espace analytique.1 The title was an allusion to a notion which was not very common at the time. Moreover, the content of his book only offered a succinct treatment of what the title announced. In L’enfant de Ça,2 written in collaboration with Jean-Luc Donnet in 1973, I proposed a theory of psychic spaces, purporting that each agency is related to its own space. Although, generally speaking, the concept of the object in psychoanalysis has been developed at length, not enough consideration has been given, perhaps, to the fact that the characteristics of an object have to be considered in relation to the space around it. At any rate, Freud did not have recourse to this kind of expression – which has only come into use on a large scale in contemporary analysis. Nowadays, there is no longer much need to explain what is being referred to. I have had occasion to point out that psychoanalytic theory has extensively elaborated the concept of space, whereas its reflection is a good deal less rich with regard to the question of time. Space and time are a priori forms of sensible knowledge, according to Kant, a statement the validity of which Freud called into question. Moreover, his object was not what pertains to consciousness but to the unconscious, which has scarcely any notion of time. But if one takes into consideration not consciousness or even the unconscious, but the psychical apparatus, one realizes that it is necessary to turn one’s attention to space and temporality, which refer to conceptions that are specific to psychoanalysis.

At the outset, Freud was interested above all in the dream-space. This was a deliberate choice. It was precisely because he was trying to penetrate the mystery of neurosis, by analysing the symptoms furnished by psychoanalytic clinical practice, that he found that he was disturbed by interference between the conscious and the unconscious as he was trying to determine what belong