CLINICAL TOPOLOGY OF AFFECT: SPACE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS FROM GLIMPSE IN FREUD

Abstract

This study examines the forms of spatiality present in Freud’s work and proposes that affect is inscribed from the outset through spatial operations, according to the idea that affect speaks before words emerge. This reading highlights the role of space, scene, and subjective position in the prerepresentational inscription of affect, treating space as a clinical operator that organizes psychic conflict and distributes positions. Drawing on the Project for Scientific Psychology (1985), the metapsychological papers (1915), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and Freud’s paradigmatic clinical cases, the study argues that the unconscious functions as a topological field of affective operations through which affect must circulate. The cases of Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man reveal that each conflict is structured by specific spatial configurations that shape subjective experience. Rather the offering a finished theory, this thesis opens a field of inquiry consistent with a Freudian perspective. It advances the hypothesis of a Clinical Topology of Affect as a framework for integrating space and affect in the understanding of psychic suffering.