Confessional religious writings and novels, from Augustine to Jane Austen, or diaries even of 20th-century holocaust victims, took the same path to self-discovery and exploration inwards - as did the cinema. Artistic realism began with internalization. In the last few centuries our inner space has expanded far beyond any possible personal experience. Yet our secret selves can also be a source of terror. Dreamers and visionaries often fear rather than delight in what they have uncovered. Identity theft has a long history - going back at least to 15th century Florence. Mystics and poets, from Dante to Newman or Hopkins, sought God in their secret spaces not least because they feared the 'abyss beneath'. The medieval three-storey universe reappears in modern psychoanalysis. The fringes of our secret selves are often porous, ill-defined, and, if some wilder prophecies of cyborgs or reincarnation have any validity, open to frightening forms of external control"--