Imagine you are in the cockpit of your mind, with an array of controls and displays around you. Close your eyes, and let the mental imagery coalesce and materialize.

Now erase the idea of the cockpit and pilot metaphor (Freud suggested a horse and rider), and survey the layout of inner experience. Spatial, affective, embodied, fantasy, flows of thought and language, the rush of adrenaline, the pull of sedation. Cartographically speaking, mapping the inner terrain is a lifelong project — some things evident, some requiring long treks into the mountains, others reflected back in social interactions and deep connection.

What's there? Is it capacious or limited, verbal or spatial, rich or thin? Where does what you find seem to come from, and where does it go? Some you can look at directly. Some operates below the surface, shaping what comes up without your authorship — what psychoanalysts spell phantasy, with a ph, to mark it off from ordinary daydreaming.

As you survey, some feels like watching: It arrives, it passes, you observe. Some feels like directing: You're doing something, moving something. When you direct, how does it feel? Like a hand reaching in? Like using the force? Or dreamlike? Different textures of inner agency, often used without noticing the differences.

This matters because the question that comes next is: What do I do with all this? When I'm stuck trying to work something through, when I want myself to act differently, when I want my life to feel different, what kind of doing is even available? We may find ourselves wondering how we move around in this inner space and how we make the best use of it.

Take a difficult decision: You need to consider feelings, immediate and longer-term consequences, relationship implications, strategy, tactics—many moving pieces, each with some kind of inner representation. The conventional move is to think it through, weigh, list. The list grows. The needle doesn't.

But we have options, alternatives to being stuck, if we can........

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