The architecture of the self 1

You don’t stop – or start – at your skin.

Your personal space, what Laban called your kinesphere, what I call your ‘psychological skin’ – all these are in some sense you. I explore this in Re-Imagining Your Body, Part One. But here’s a different take on the same theme: Paul Newham’s concept of “spherical space,” which I think throws important light on the underlying issue.

According to Newham, throughout life and no matter what actual space we find ourselves in, we are also “enclosed by the memory of early space” like a sphere that surrounds us (Using Voice and Movement in Therapy, 22). A person’s spherical space is a legacy of very early experiences, both when in the womb and in early infancy. It is spherical above all because before sight becomes a dominant sense, the baby experiences its world as surrounding and enclosing it, firstly in the amniotic fluid and secondly in what Newham calls the “sonorous envelope created between mother and infant” (25). The spherical space we carry with us contains the traces of those early experiences, whether of safety and security or of threat and insecurity.

In the Voice Movement Therapy developed by Newham, a client is led to become aware of their spherical space, to understand how it defines them and ultimately to transform it. What interests me here, though, is the way Newham associates the spherical space with the self. He suggest that when we sense the particular quality of presence of another person, it is because we detect and respond to the nature of their spherical space, adding that "we can detect this Self before the person has said a word or moved a muscle" (25). Even so, a person's spherical space becomes more obvious to any observer in the way the person moves. To a great extent, Newham argues, the character of any physical environment will influence the manner in which different individuals move within it in much the same way, so differences in the quality of their movement can be attributed to the way each is also moving within an emotionally charged personal environment carried over from early infancy.

If this spherical space is identified – or at least closely associated – with the self, then a very interesting inversion of our usual way of thinking about the self occurs. I, as a physical body, am inside my (psychological) self, rather than my (psychological) self being somehow ‘inside’ my physical body!

What this dramatizes is the way that we start life without a ‘self,’ because we start life without any clear boundaries between self and environment. Most people believe that we then go on to internalize the early environmental influences on us. But Newham’s concept of spherical space suggests that it’s more complex than that. It also suggests that the self is not hidden or secret at all, although it may well be difficult to ‘read’ precisely.

Crucially, although each of us carries their spherical space with them, we are not necessarily always at the centre of it. Hence Newham’s exercises are not only concerned to bring out the size of a client’s surrounding sphere (which is variable not only from one individual to another but also for any single individual at different times), but also the different feelings the client experiences at the centre, the front, the back or the sides of the sphere. Through this exploration of the architecture of the self, above all, the feelings generated become translatable into meanings:

As clients move through their sphere, it is usual for specific places within it to arouse particular affects, even though the relationship between identifiable geometric points within the sphere and the feelings, moods and sensations aroused by them is different for each person…. For many, the back of the sphere instigates sensations of withdrawal, depression, introversion and fear; whilst for others, meanwhile, it offers security, protection and a sense of confident stability. The front of the sphere for some is unnerving, exposing and feels dangerously unprotected; whilst for others it is experienced as liberating and a place from which they can be seen and heard (31).

It could be argued, of course, that clients are projecting their internal structures of emotion onto an imaginary sphere. But when we’re dealing with our experience of self, is there such a gap between the real and the imaginary?

For me, the most important implication of Newham’s concept is that the distinction we usually make between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds is an oversimplification. It suggests that there is a kind of interpenetration of the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. A stronger sense of this will help us avoid the simplistic reductions that our culture is prone to.

For anyone interested in voice work, by the way, in a performance as well as a therapeutic context, Newham's book is very valuable, both for theoretical understanding and for the exercises it describes.