GASTON BACHELARD

Gaston Bachelard

Space as psychic topography

In The Poetics of Space, house, room, attic, cellar, drawer, corner and nest are not merely physical locations. They can organize memory, dream, fear, intimacy and imagination.

Psychic topography: architecture becomes a structure through which inner experience is felt. Intimate space is lived, imagined and remembered.

The attic ↔ cellar polarity is useful but not a rigid universal symbolism. Spatial structures can organize psychic experience without literally thinking for the subject.