Summary: What enhances and constricts mental space - space for reflection, for feeling, for relating to others, for being open to experience? The author addresses this question in the light of two sets of issues: first, how we locate psychoanalysis in the history of thought about nature and human nature, with particular reference to Cartesian mind-body dualism; second, which psychoanalytic approaches are most useful and resonant with our experience, as contrasted with scientisfic versions of paychology. He then turns to key concepts which bear on these issues; culture and cultural studies, transference and counter-transference in the analytic space psychotic anxieties and other primitive processes, projective identification and transitional phenomena.