Psyche is Extended
One of the last things Freud wrote were a series of fragments on a single piece of paper, the last of which I am writing my thesis on (that you can read about here), but the second to last of which is no less perplexing, and has puzzled myself and a whole host of other readers, for sometime. This second to last note is as follows:
Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it (1938, SE XXIII, p 300)
It has been argued recently by Italian psychoanalyst Paolo Carignani that the thesis “psyche is extended” is not instead of Kant, but rather Kant reaffirmed by psychoanalysis. “Where is the place of this human soul in the world of bodies?” Kant asks “Where I feel, it is there that I am.” Kant thinks of the soul “as extended and as diffused throughout the whole body.” As Carignani argues, it is likely that Freud had read this, confirmed by the same word in his fragment—extended: ausgedehnt—and confirmed likewise because he had been debating Princess Marie Bonaparte on behalf of Kant’s a priori categories by letter only just that week. These a priori categories assert that space and time are not features of objective reality, but rather intuitive mental coordinates. Freud argues the same in such works as A Note Upon The Mystic Writing Pad (1924), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Unconscious (1915) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
A very weird picture emerges. Space, as a mental coordinate, is derived first from our psyche extended throughout the space of our body; this extension is then projected outwards onto external reality as would be a map. That psyche “knows nothing about it” infers that space is not a product of consciousness—this is no skin-ego—rather the category three-dimensional space is a result of our unconscious—that mediator occupying the frontier between somatic and mental. A mirrored sphere emerges from those borderlands where body meets psyche, where subject becomes object; this mercurial sphere increases in size as our psychical contents—our psycho-mythology—are projected out to the rim of the horizon and sky. Language makes this horizon common and soon it is the world itself. The very spatiality of space is but a psychical extension; the outside world is a projection of unconscious interiority, of which we know nothing about.
Freud, 1938, SE XXIII, p 300
