INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE ARCHAIC SPACE

The examination of the pathways of projections and the positioning of persecutors in external, geographical space in paranoid patients led t he author to formulate a hypothesis concerning an archaic space. Archa ic space is made up of primary objects. It is initially established ar ound the oral or rather pre-oedipal mother, which as a stable, introje cted, internal object, always seems to be represented in the right hal f of archaic space, irrespective of the individual's handedness. Archa ic space is two-dimensional. The body, divided mentally by a sagittal cut into a left and right half, also forms an integral part of archaic space. The categories of left and right appear to be constant signs o f primary objects in their archaic spatial relations to the body ego. Use of the well-known symbolic meaning of the house, as the patient's own body, allows us to follow the pathways taken by the projections of the paranoid patients within the geographical space. These projectory pathways are subjective, but at the same time spatially ''real'', sin ce they use elements of ''material reality'' and can be configured in space, for instance, in the topography of the room, house neighbourhoo d town, country or even continent. The point of orientation taken is t he patient's position, when facing the actual entrance to his or her h ome. Only from this starting point can we succeed in plotting the cour se of the projection of internal objects and instinctual impulses, whi ch are ''directed at'' neighbours, the persecutors. The clinical exper ience of paranoid patients with persecutory ideas shows that the perse cutors are regularly placed in the left half of archaic space (the spa ce of paranoia vera). Analysis of patients with perversions and early disturbances who have had paranoid experiences helped the author to un derstand the meaning of the right half of archaic space: the splitting - projection of the archaic maternal imago to the right. Patients wit h ideas or fears of being poisoned, strangled or devoured and such lik e, place the threatening object (the early mother-imago) in the right half of archaic space. In the end, the spatial structure of paranoia i s discussed.