Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis

Time and space provide the coordinates for the exploration of psychological phenomena and, more specifically, of what takes place in the psychoanalyst’s consulting room: in the minds of the two participants, as well as in the complex relationship that develops between them.

Boundaries and Bridges consists of eleven chapters covering, among others, such topics as: the development of a sense of time in children, the temporal dimension of the psychoanalytic setting, the function of the couch in the therapeutic process, the importance of silence, and of sounds, in human development and in the analytic relationship itself.

Illustrated by the case material about a “replacement child” and by several clinical vignettes, the book, as stated in its thought-provoking Introduction, is the author’s attempt to distil some of the ideas which, in the course of almost forty years of analytic work, have emerged as foundations to his thinking and practice.

The book is written in a fluent, easily accessible style. Its content is informed by a variety of psychoanalytic theories underpinning the observations made about the human mind in general, and the clinical situation in particular, but with little technical jargon cluttering up its pages. Reading it should convince even those skeptical about the value of psychoanalysis that our discipline is indeed a powerful tool for the understanding of our most intimate experiences.