[Il y a] en chacun de nous un diagramme de chute, une instinctive et indestructible peur de tomber. Sans le désastre intime des vertiges inoubliables, on ne comprendrait guère l’unité des métaphores les plus diverses, les plus lointaines. En fait, les gouffres réels restent une exception sur notre bonne terre, on peut souvent éviter de les aller voir, éviter d’aller trembler devant eux. Mais notre inconscient est comme creusé par un abîme imaginaire. En nous, toute chose peut tomber, toute chose peut venir en nous s’anéantir. Dès lors, en dépit de toute grammaire, le mot gouffre n’est pas un nom d’objet, c’est un adjectif psychique qui peut s’adjoindre à de nombreuses expériences. (Bachelard, Volonté, 307)

In this book, Bachelard is still referring to psychoanalysis, his investigation of the role of elements in our imagination, though he will soon turn to a kind of phenomenology. Psychoanalysis implies that our elemental fears (or, more generally, the values that elements may take) depend on the structure of our mind, our unconscious mind, this part of us that elsewhere Bachelard relates to the night. The “man of the night” in us does not know history, progress, cannot learn anything, but is haunted by the same fears that elements have always induced.

However, Bachelard's psychoanalysis has a different content from Freud's psychoanalysis. Bachelard refers mostly to Jung but he still goes one step further. He refuses to relate the elemental fears, say his vertigo of Strasbourg, to a family history, or a repressed desire. For instance, Freud discovers in the phobia of windows (a kind of vertigo) a fascination for prostitution. In Freud's Vienna, women standing at the window were prostitutes. The upper-class Viennese ladies who came to Freud and who were not prostitutes both wished and feared they could be (that is Freud's opinion). That is why they dreaded windows. But, looking for a reason to dread windows, they convinced themselves they were afraid of falling through. In fact, they became afraid of falling, from windows and towers and mountains. But this vertigo is not, according to Freud, the true, fundamental fear, which concerns one's own desires. It is, in fact, the fear and urge to be devoured and to devour. The emptiness below windows is just a mask for another object of fear. Thus the emptiness becomes something.

Bachelard does attempt an analysis of the imagination, which is structured by various elements and these diffracted into various complexes. But elemental fears, though analyzed in this sense, are not reduced to another, and more fundamental, fear. Bachelard's method already comes close to a phenomenology except that the fear is not really concerned with an element outside of us but is related to an internal structure, a “diagram,” to use Bachelard's term. We would be afraid of falling even if there were no abysses on Earth: the fear of falling is impressed in our mind.

Here, I believe, Bachelard is wrong. The fear of falling, the image of the abyss, is an aspect of the element earth that is a certain echo in our mind of the element. Then there is the problem of fear, or dread, when there is no danger. In the tunnel of the Fréjus, for instance. Or the pond in front of the House of Usher, in Poe's short story. Where does the dread come from? The mind strives to find something that could actually represent a danger: the tunnel could collapse, or the water might be poisonous. But these dangers are secondary, they come later on. Initially, there is just the fear of the element, a threat that the element seems to bear, as if I discovered an unknown presence close to me. I don't know what it is, an animal, a human, a ghost, or a being yet stranger that has no name, and I don't know whether it is friend, or fiend, if it is gentle, or vicious, or scared, or self-absorbed and does not care, but it is there.

To me, Bachelard is wrong in ascribing the elemental fears to the human imagination. What is needed is not psychoanalysis but a sort of phenomenology, a phenomenology of the extra-ordinary that develops the ordinary, that limited category of common sense, through fiction. I think this, in fact, is what Bachelard does in his later work. But Bachelard is also wrong in relating the elemental fear to the image of an actual danger: again, elemental fears are produced by the elements themselves. We have fear, or there is dread, when the equilibrium between the elements in which we are used to living is modified, and one element – earth in the tunnel, air on the tower, or water, or fire – takes an unusual preeminence.