Space occupies a remarkably varied conceptual terrain across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmological substrate, phenomenological structure, cognitive framework, psychological metaphor, and spiritual ground. The tradition reveals at least four distinct registers in which space is theorized. First, space as ontological receptacle: from Plato’s Timaeus — where the Receptacle (chōra) is figured as an invisible, characterless medium that receives all forms without itself taking on any — through Epicurean treatments of void as permanent co-constituent of reality. Second, space as existential condition: Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time situates space as first disclosed through ready-to-hand engagement, not abstract geometric extension, while Merleau-Ponty insists that bodily space underpins any notion of objective spatiality. Third, space as psychological and spiritual openness: Welwood, drawing on Buddhist sources, renders awareness itself as space — a luminous, unconditioned ground that transcends conditioning — and Trungpa identifies ‘open space’ as the fundamental state prior to ego-formation. Fourth, space as neurocognitive and cultural construction: McGilchrist contrasts space’s multiplicity and plasticity against time’s singular irreversibility; Vernant traces how political and mythic conceptions of sacred and civic space structured Greek thought. The central tension is between space as given background and space as actively constituted through bodily, psychic, or cultural practice.
the spacious quality of our being, which is intrinsically free from past conditioning. Our very awareness is, indeed, a kind of open space.
Welwood argues that psychological space — the intrinsic openness of awareness — is the precondition for liberation from conditioned personality, identifying it with the Buddhist teaching that mind’s essence is space-like and untouched by its own contents.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
Fundamentally there is just open space, the basic ground, what we really are. Our most fundamental state of mind, before the creation of ego, is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality.
Trungpa identifies open space as the primordial ground of mind itself, prior to ego-construction, making spatial openness a foundational category of Buddhist depth-psychological anthropology.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973thesis
Plato’s Space is not a void which remains completely distinct from particles moving in it; it is a Recipient which affords a basis for images reflected in it, as in a mirror.
Cornford’s commentary establishes that Plato’s chōra is an active Receptacle — not inert void — that functions as the ontological medium receiving sensible images of eternal Forms, distinguishing it sharply from atomistic empty space.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
we become aware of a subjective Space-extension in which mind itself lives and moves and which is other than physical Space-Time, and yet there is an interpenetration.
Aurobindo posits a hierarchy of spaces — physical, mental, and pure spiritual — arguing that consciousness can withdraw into levels of space-experience that progressively transcend material space-time coordinates.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland.
McGilchrist argues that space and time are phenomenologically and ontologically asymmetric — space being passive, multiple, and revisable where time is singular, irreversible, and constitutive of consciousness.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Consciousness exists in time, but not in space. For elements that are often conflated, their qualities could hardly be more different.
McGilchrist insists that consciousness is temporally, not spatially, constituted, drawing a sharp ontological distinction between the two dimensions most often collapsed in naturalistic accounts.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Our spatial sense of the world is both deep and intuitive, and very largely right hemisphere-dependent. It is only later that we develop abstract ways of representing space.
McGilchrist grounds lived spatial sense in right-hemisphere cognition, distinguishing embodied spatial intuition from the abstract, conventional geometric representations that emerge later developmentally.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The mapping and measuring of space, as Poincaré points out, though different entirely from our experience of space, is by no means arbitrary.
McGilchrist, following Poincaré, argues that abstract geometric space is a useful but potentially deceitful convention that diverges fundamentally from the lived spatial experience it purports to represent.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the Hermes-Hestia couple represents the marked tension in the archaic conception of space: space requires a center, a nodal point, with a special value … yet, at the same time, space is the medium of movement.
Vernant reads the divine polarity of Hestia and Hermes as encoding an archaic Greek tension in the concept of space itself — between a sacred fixed center and the open medium of transition and passage.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
With Being-in-the-world, space is proximally discovered in this spatiality. On the basis of the spatiality thus discovered, space itself becomes accessible for cognition.
Heidegger argues that geometrically neutral space is derived from the prior, practically oriented spatiality of Being-in-the-world, not given in raw perception, reversing the standard epistemological order.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
One must therefore reject as an abstraction any analysis of bodily space which takes account only of figures and points, since these can neither be conceived nor be without horizons.
Merleau-Ponty insists that bodily space is always already structured by figure-ground and point-horizon relationships, making the body — not geometry — the primordial origin of spatial experience.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
‘absolute, true and mathematical space’ subsists independent of all perceivable things. In itself it is empty — a void … it can neither be created nor destroyed.
Abram describes Newton’s postulate of absolute space as a philosophical abstraction — an empty, infinite, indifferent void — whose assumption of priority over lived relational space he ultimately critiques.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
mind per se also transcends space. For, as the … mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
Evans-Wentz argues, following Tibetan Buddhist teaching and citing Milton, that mind in its primordial condition transcends spatial locality, being its own space rather than a contents located within space.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
Every change of coordinate systems mixes space and time in a mathematically defined way. Space and time are thus inseparably connected and form a four-dimensional continuum.
Von Franz uses Einstein’s relativity to argue that space and time form an inseparable four-dimensional continuum, connecting this insight to archaic cosmological intuitions and Jungian synchronicity discussions.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
When therefore we speak of the necessity of our ideas of space we must remember that this is a necessity which has grown up with the growth of the human mind, and has been made by ourselves.
The Theaetetus commentary argues that space is not a fixed a priori form but a historically conditioned necessity constituted through the development of human mind and language, anticipating constructivist epistemology.
, Theaetetus, -369supporting
hestia defines the center of a space in which relationships are reversible … the center, in its political sense, was able to act as an intermediary between the ancient, mythical view of the center and the new, rational idea of the center.
Vernant traces how Hestia’s mythic function as sacred center mediates between qualitatively differentiated sacred space and the geometrically isotropic political space of the Greek polis.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
THE SYMBOLISM OF SPACE, COLOURS, ELEMENTS, GESTURES, AND SPIRITUAL QUALITIES … colours play an important role in the appearances of the Dhyani-Buddhas.
Govinda treats space as a primary symbolic and cosmological category within Tibetan Buddhist tantra, where it is integrated with color, element, gesture, and spiritual quality in a unified system of inner-visionary mapping.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
that which is duly to receive over its whole extent and many times over all the likenesses of the intelligible and eternal things ought in its own nature to be free of all the characters.
Plato’s Timaeus requires that the Receptacle-space be utterly characterless so it can receive all forms without bias, establishing an apophatic theory of space as pure potentiality prior to determination.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept ‘empty space’ loses its meaning.
McGilchrist, citing Einstein, argues that empty space is a conceptually vacuous abstraction — things are not contained in space but are themselves spatially extended, dissolving the container-contents model.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
By choosing instead space in the broadest sense — a notion which he is, arguably, the first ancient thinker to isolate — he ensures the permanence of his second element.
Long and Sedley credit Epicurus with being the first ancient thinker to isolate a general concept of space — encompassing both occupied and unoccupied extension — as a permanent ontological constituent alongside body.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
their astronomy was not projected onto a spatial schema … Greek astronomy was, from the start, radically different.
Vernant contrasts Babylonian arithmetic astronomy, which lacked any geometric spatial schema, with Greek astronomy’s fundamental commitment to projecting celestial phenomena onto spatial-geometric models.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside
‘space’ is a theoretical idea — a concept — not a concrete, fixed entity; space is always computed in relation to something else.
Barrett uses the concept of space as an analogy to argue that psychological concepts are not fixed things but relational, context-dependent constructions — dissolving spatial and conceptual realism simultaneously.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside
space and time are considered as fundamental categories of nature, that is, as categories of the Idea as exteriority, the Idea as juxtaposition or separation, Being-outside-itself.
Derrida, following Hegel’s Encyclopedia, situates space and time as the primary categories of the Idea in its mode of externality and mutual exteriority — the medium of Nature’s self-alienation.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside
those who refuse to share water and fire (referring to the space of hospitality — Hestia) and … those who do not point the way for wanderers (referring to the space of the traveller — Hermes).
Vernant demonstrates through ritual cursing formulae that Greek sacred space was structured by two qualitatively opposed spatial modes — the bounded domestic space of hospitality and the open, directional space of the traveller.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside