Inner Space: Mental Health and Subjectivity in Orbit
When outer space meets inner emptiness. Long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, men and women left Earth to explore the edges of the cosmos. Yet inside the silence of their capsules, where spatial emptiness meets psychic emptiness, another journey begins: the journey of the mind in weightlessness. Since 2023, I have been conducting research on the psychological effects of extreme confined environments, in collaboration with Université Paris Cité. This emerging clinical field draws on psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. To deepen this work, I have documented the issues at stake by speaking with NASA collaborators and with solo sailors whose experience of isolation and inner crossing resonates strikingly with that of astronauts. These encounters, readings, and observations have shaped the questions I explore here - within a clinical, ethical, and exploratory framework.
This field concerns astronauts, of course, but also submariners, and researchers isolated in polar stations (such as those at Dome C in Antarctica), where a single habitation shelters teams for months in near‑permanent night. These situations share a common structure: isolation, close quarters, rupture with familiar sensory and social cues, and the need to maintain function within a constrained environment. They challenge the subject’s capacity to represent, to symbolize, to maintain connection despite absence, to inhabit a space that no longer refers to Earth but to infinity. Human missions to the Moon (Artemis program) and ongoing studies on Mars expeditions raise unprecedented questions about astronauts’ mental health. Research from NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency shows that prolonged orbital missions carry increased risks of psychological difficulties: anxiety, depression, irritability, sleep disturbances, interpersonal tensions. Several early returns have been documented, motivated by depressive symptoms or group conflict. Comparative studies suggest that orbital missions - especially aboard the International Space Station - generate more psychological complications than lunar or planetary stays, where gravitational and environmental cues are partially restored.
Microgravity affects the body, but also the sense of identity. The floating subject, deprived of verticality, experiences altered sensory and symbolic orientation. The 90‑minute day/night cycle aboard the ISS disrupts circadian rhythms, affecting mood and concentration. Confinement, intense workload, and lack of privacy create constant tension, even among the most resilient profiles. Beyond the individual, the group becomes a clinical issue. Living with three or four people for two years on a spacecraft to Mars requires stable relational dynamics, affect regulation, conflict negotiation, and cohesion without fusion. Interpersonal tensions, micro‑irritations, and accumulated frustrations can become symptoms. Selection is not enough: what matters is the arrangement of personalities, their compatibility, their relational plasticity. The multicultural dimension adds another layer of complexity. Astronauts come from different cultures, with different codes, languages, and emotional grammars. Communication becomes a central challenge: how to speak, understand, and support one another when words themselves do not resonate the same way?
Connection with loved ones is also strained. During a Mars mission, communication delays between Earth and the spacecraft are estimated at 25 minutes. This means that when one partner speaks, the other will not hear the response until nearly an hour later. This temporal gap makes emotional exchanges difficult, even frustrating. Studies in space psychology show that such communication alters the sense of presence, increases loneliness, and can affect emotional stability. Families on Earth also experience a form of floating anxiety: absence of direct contact, uncertainty, projection into an unknown space. Children of astronauts have expressed feelings of loss, anger, or ambivalent fascination. Family bonds become a research topic in themselves.
In this context, psychoanalysis offers valuable tools. It allows us to think about the spatial fantasy, the desire for transcendence, the quest for immortality embedded in cosmic exploration. It interrogates the defenses mobilized against emptiness, separation anxiety, and loss of orientation. It invites us to consider outer space as a mirror of inner space: what we project into the stars is also what we flee or seek within ourselves. By symbolic anchoring, I refer to the psychic function of Earth as a stable reference point, an imaginal matrix, a place of origin and return. It embodies a sensory, emotional, and narrative anchor around which the subject organizes representations, rhythms, and bonds. In orbit, this anchor dissolves: it is no longer visible, accessible, or inhabitable. This loss can provoke deep disorientation, an altered sense of existence, even an identity crisis.
A clinical analogy can be drawn with the infant’s passage from intrauterine life to birth. In the placenta, the baby is contained, enveloped, nourished effortlessly, immersed in rhythmic and sensory regularity. This environment forms the first anchor, both biological and symbolic. At birth, this reference disappears abruptly: the infant must breathe, regulate temperature, seek the breast, adjust to a world that no longer contains them in a fused way. Similarly, the astronaut in orbit loses their “terrestrial placenta”, as the gravitational, sensory, symbolic field that connected them to the planet. They must reinvent forms of psychic continuity in an environment that no longer naturally contains them. Here, clinical thinking meets poetics: how does one maintain an inner Earth when the body floats, when time dilates, when connection fractures?
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the character Deanna Troi, counselor aboard the Enterprise, embodies this psychic function within the group. Even the android Data, devoid of affect, explores with her the limits of consciousness and connection. In the episode “The Loss,” Deanna Troi suddenly loses her empathic abilities. This disturbance, experienced as a psychic amputation, plunges her into an identity crisis. This moment of vulnerability shows that even in a technologically advanced universe, psychological suffering remains central. The episode becomes a metaphor for burnout, loss of meaning, and the need to redefine oneself beyond one’s competencies. These fictional figures express a collective intuition: space exploration cannot occur without psychological care. Outer emptiness becomes the stage for inner emptiness — and sometimes, for its traversal.
References Bachelard, G. (1943). Air and dreams. José Corti. Kanas, N., & Manzey, D. (2008). Space psychology and psychiatry. Springer. Stuster, J. (2010). Bold endeavors: Lessons from polar and space exploration. Naval Institute Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock. Van Ombergen, A., Demertzi, A., & Laureys, S. (2017). The human brain in space. npj Microgravity, 3(1), 1–5.
