The Experience of Time: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

In contemporary psychoanalysis, the concepts of time and history have become increasingly complex. It is evident that this trend offers us an opportunity to think about the intercrossing of the different temporal dimensions imbuing the subject, an inevitable aspect of the analytic process. History is time past but what is recovered is now the working through of the subject history, which carries the mark of both passing time and re-signifying time. It is precisely the notion of history that gains different dimensions when a purely deterministic analysis is disassembled.

We find continuities and breaks between subjective time and chronological time; between the inevitable decrepitude of the biological body with the passing of time and the timelessness of the unconscious; between linear, circular times and retroactive re-signification; between facts, screen memories, memory and the work of constructing history; between the times of repetition and the times of difference; between reversible and irreversible time; between the timelessness of the unconscious and the temporalities of the ego. The time arrow points toward an irreversible time, with no return, but coexisting with circular times and the times of repetition.

These plural, heterogeneous dimensions of time also enable us to think in terms of generating a prospective, future space of the time of becoming, of a desiring project or of anticipation, based on new versions of the past. In this context we are interested in underscoring the timespace relation in the psychoanalytic field (psychoanalytic space, space of the session). The papers collected in this book illustrate these concepts with all the theoretical variations characterizing state-of-the-art psychoanalysis.

Contributors
Ingeborg Bornholdt, André Green, Charles Hanly, Otto Kernberg, Jose E. Milmaniene, Michael Parsons, Rosine Perelberg, Janine Puget, Satish Reddy, Jean-Claude Rolland