A Matter of Time: Actual Time and The Production of the Past

Abstract

In psychoanalytic theory, space metaphors are frequently used to describe the psychic apparatus. As for time, it is traditionally invoked under the heading of timelessness of the unconscious, more aptly described as the resistance of the repressed to wearing away with time. This paper examines how the insertion of time into psychic events and structural differentiation form a single process. After looking into the parallelism between phenomenological and psychoanalytic views of time and differentiation, the author draws a distinction between two time categories: chronological versus actual. A clinical example is presented.

On Time and Deepening in Psychoanalysis

“…Clinically, the development of a sense of temporality may initiate or indicate movement toward a higher level ordering of experience. Scarfone (2006) pointed out that the sense of a past and the sense of a present arise in the same instant-that we move from a state of unreflective timelessness to a sense of the present as a moment in time only by recognizing that the present differs from the past, that we cannot have both at one time. Fink (1993) and Lombardi (2003) presented material from the treatment of very primitive patients to show that the analyst's introduction of the awareness of time provides a leading edge of differentiation and reflectiveness that permits a broader reorganization of experience.…”

“…This translation too is both reified and misleading; the earliest moments in mental life are not necessarily the most central ones, either developmentally or in the here and now (Wachtel, 2003). Contemporary understandings of time and the past in mental life (Fink, 1993;Levine, 2009;Scarfone, 2006;Schafer, 1983;Stern, 2003) focus on the presence, or even the construction of the past in present experience, and on the constantly recursive nature of analytic construction, in which the past comes alive and is rewritten again and again in the here and now. Nevertheless, the equation of time with space captures an aspect of our subjective experience-that time is linear and we journey through it.…”

Temporality and the torments of time

“…‘Space contains [both] living and inert bodies; however, only the living human, hence the living psyche, is subjectively concerned with time’ (Scarfone , p. 810). Entering into time involves loss of the illusion of safety and unity.…”

“…Like all artists, they probably envisioned others in an unknown future also regarding their works. 1 One might speculate that ritual visits to such paintings manifested a drive to disrupt the grip of repetition (agieren), of circular action and reaction, the mere being of everyday life (Marucco 2007;Scarfone 2011). Remembering, continually re-creating the past, is the living ground of our subjectivity.…”

Sifting through the sands of time: Mourning and melancholia revisited via the documentary Nostalgia for the light (2011)

“…When thoughts become not only thinkable but speakable, they can become translated over time into personal history, re‐created by the patient in the two‐person relationship with the analyst. In a paper called A matter of time: Actual time and the past , Scarfone () makes a compelling argument for seeing consciousness itself as being inseparable from existential time and chronology. Object constancy and an ongoing sense of time may have been severely disrupted by trauma and disorganization.…”