«According to Winnicott, “no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality...” But Wittgenstein challenged the validity of an adjectival “inner” in psychological contexts: “…one of the most dangerous ideas is the idea that we think with, or in, our heads. The idea of a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, makes thinking something occult.” Roy Schafer drew on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to debunk inner world reifications within psychoanalytic theory. His seminal book, “A New Language for Psychoanalysis”, published in 1976, brought together his thinking from the preceding decade. According to Schafer: “…we cannot specify in a systematically useful way what anything mental is inside of.”[…]

Once our most ubiquitous spatial metaphor – that of the inner world - has become mythologised, various territorial imperatives necessarily ensue, as we defend an inner world against intrusion, possessing an inner world as my space not yours. We cannot renounce our words, but can we renounce our adherence to some sort of inner world? Is our linguistic sophistry all too seductive? […]

Schafer’s ‘action model’ definition of mind as “something we do; it is neither something we have nor something we are or are not related to or in possession of.” According to Schafer: “It has never been helpful to systematic explanatory thinking or teaching to resort to these anthropomorphic, spatial, and mechanical metaphors [of mind]…) […]

Perhaps our thinking can never quite lose […] somatic trappings; specifically, the projection onto our mental life of our earliest orality. Just as Breuer pointed out the “irresistible” spatial metaphor accompanying our thinking, so the ego’s bodily origins pervade our idiom, in the form of chewing over, taking in, biting off. And I hope I am providing food for thought, not talking shit. It may even take guts to raise this doubt. Our intellectual nourishment requires digestion to be understood. The very pervasiveness of the gastro-intestinal metaphor suggests that whenever we propose an inner world, we are projecting these oral origins onto later experience. The inner world is the lumen of our subjectivity.[…]

According to philosopher Roderick Anscombe, Schafer failed to appreciate these in-between spaces – particularly between conscious agency and an unconscious, or relatively inaccessible, aspect of subjectivity. Anscombe identifies this short-coming as a fatal error in Schafer’s approach. Psychoanalytic experience must necessarily inhabit such uncertain terrain, as between consciousness and the unconscious, along “an unbroken scale passing through every degree of vagueness and obscurity.”

The work of psychoanalysis may be that effort required to keep ourselves and our patients aloft, figurative, against that relentless gravitational pull of the literal: the effort of keeping an inner world open, when of course we know there is no such space at all. This may only make sense when there is someone with whom to create the inter-subjectivity of expression: when we learn that our thoughts are merely rehearsals for conversation.

To open up a shared space which brings into question an inner space has been the task of this paper. As therapists, we have a position from which to transcend the metaphor of position, so inner world becomes inner life, and where, in Winnicott’s phrase: “We need to be able to think hallucinatorily.”»

— Dr. Bruce Lachter. The inner world: dangerous myth or useful metaphor?