Marie Nussbaum

Inner Space: Mental Health and Subjectivity in Orbit

When outer space meets inner emptiness

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, men and women left Earth to explore the edges of the cosmos. But in the silence of the capsules, where outer space meets inner emptiness, another journey begins: that of the psyche 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 inquiry, I have documented the issues through exchanges with NASA contacts and solo navigators, whose experience of isolation and inner navigation resonates strongly with that of astronauts. These encounters, readings, and observations have helped refine the questions I raise here — through a clinical, ethical, and exploratory lens.

Extreme environments and confined isolation

This field concerns astronauts, of course, but also submariners, solo sailors, and researchers isolated in polar stations — such as those at Dome C in Antarctica, where a single habitation shelters teams for several months in near-permanent darkness. These situations share a common structure: isolation, close quarters, disruption of sensory and social reference points, and the need to maintain function within a constrained setting. They challenge the subject’s ability to represent, to symbolize, to sustain connection despite absence, and to inhabit a space that no longer refers to Earth but to infinity.

Human missions to the Moon (Artemis program) and ongoing studies on Martian expeditions raise unprecedented questions about astronauts’ mental health. Research conducted by NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency shows that prolonged orbital flights carry increased risks of psychological disorders: anxiety, depression, irritability, sleep disturbances, interpersonal tensions. Several documented cases involved early return due to depressive symptoms or group conflict. A comparative study suggests that orbital missions — particularly aboard the International Space Station — generate more psychological complications than stays on lunar or planetary bases, where gravitational and environmental reference points are partially restored.

Microgravity and floating identity

Microgravity affects the body, but also the sense of identity. The floating subject, deprived of verticality, experiences altered sensory and symbolic reference points. The 90-minute day/night cycle aboard the International Space Station disrupts circadian rhythms, impacting mood and concentration. Confinement, intense workload, and lack of privacy generate constant tension, even among the most resilient profiles.

Beyond the individual, the group becomes a clinical concern. Living with three or four people for two years aboard a Mars-bound shuttle requires stable relational dynamics, emotional regulation, conflict negotiation, and cohesion without fusion. Interpersonal tensions, micro-irritations, and accumulated frustrations can become symptomatic. Selecting profiles is not enough: it’s their arrangement, compatibility, and relational plasticity that matter.

Multicultural dynamics add further complexity. Astronauts come from different cultures, with distinct codes, languages, ways of thinking and feeling that may clash. Communication becomes a major issue: how to express, understand, and support one another when words resonate differently?

Remote connection and terrestrial families

Connection with loved ones is also strained. On a Martian mission, the communication delay between Earth and the shuttle is estimated at 25 minutes. This means that when one partner speaks, the other won’t hear the reply for nearly an hour. Such temporal lag makes emotional exchanges difficult, even frustrating. Studies in space psychology show that this type of communication alters the sense of presence, increases loneliness, and can affect emotional stability.

Families left on Earth also experience a form of floating anxiety: lack of direct contact, uncertainty, projection into an unknown space. Children of some astronauts have expressed feelings of loss, anger, or ambivalent fascination. The family bond becomes a research topic in its own right.

Psychoanalytic contributions and symbolic anchoring

In this context, psychoanalysis offers valuable tools. It helps us think through the spatial fantasy, the desire for transcendence, the quest for immortality that space exploration carries. It examines the defenses mobilized against emptiness, separation anxiety, and loss of reference points. It invites us to consider space as a mirror of inner space: what we project into the stars is also what we flee or seek within ourselves.

Psychoanalysis reads outer space as a metaphor for inner emptiness, and investigates the defenses mobilized against absence, infinity, and the loss of Earth as a symbolic anchor.

By symbolic anchor, I mean the psychic function that Earth plays as a stable reference point — an imaginal matrix, a place of origin and return. It embodies a sensory, emotional, and narrative reference around which the subject can organize representations, rhythms, and connections. 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. The symbolic anchor is not just a physical territory, but the capacity to inscribe one’s experience within a psychic continuity, a memory, a story.

Clinical analogy: birth and separation

A clinical analogy can be made with the infant’s passage from intrauterine life to birth. In the placenta, the baby is contained, enveloped, effortlessly nourished, bathed in sensory and rhythmic regularity. This environment constitutes 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. This passage is a separation trial, but also an opportunity for subjectivation. What allows the baby to traverse this rupture are transitional objects, enveloping gestures, voices, rhythms, and presences that recreate a space of continuity between inside and outside.

Similarly, the astronaut in orbit loses their “terrestrial placenta” — 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. This is where clinical work meets poetics: how to maintain an inner Earth when the body floats, when time dilates, when connection diffracts?

Cultural metaphors and psychic care

These issues, though rooted in science fiction narratives, open very real and interdisciplinary research avenues. They concern neuroscience, remote bonding psychology, confined group dynamics, astronaut anthropology, and the ethical challenges of embedded care.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the character of Deanna Troi, counselor aboard the Enterprise, embodies this psychic function within the crew. Played by Greek-American actress Marina Sirtis, she is part psychoanalyst, part empath, able to sense others’ emotions and translate them into language. She supports Captain Picard’s decisions, assists crew members, and intervenes in moments of crisis. Even the robot Data, devoid of affect, explores with her the boundaries of consciousness and connection. In the episode “The Loss,” Deanna Troi suddenly loses her empathic abilities. This psychic rupture plunges her into an identity crisis. She questions her role, her usefulness, her place aboard the ship. The episode, handled with nuance, becomes a metaphor for burnout, loss of meaning, and the need to redefine oneself beyond function.

These fictional figures are far from anecdotal: they reflect a collective intuition that space exploration cannot proceed without psychic care. In Star Wars, even the Jedi are haunted by inner conflicts, losses, and invisible loyalties. Outer space becomes the stage for inner emptiness — and sometimes, its traversal.

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