Witnessing across Time: Accessing the Present from the Past and The Past from the Present

Abstract

We are used to the idea that trauma in the past interrupts our capacity to grasp the present. But present or recent trauma can have a similar dissociative effect on our capacity to experience the more distant past. Contemporary trauma can rob the past of its goodness, leaving one feeling as if the past is gone, dead, separated from the present. The vitalization of the present by the past or the past by the present requires that experiences be linked across time. These links are created, in both directions, via categories of experience characterized by shared affect (Modell 1990, 2006). Such categories are created, in turn, by metaphor; and the construction of these metaphors across time requires that one be able to occupy self-states in both the past and the present that can then bear witness to one another. Trauma can result in the dissociation of these self-states from one another, leading to a disconnection of present and past.

Unformulated experience, dissociation, and Nachträglichkeit

“…It is through the medium of the field that the present retranscribes the past and the past shapes the present. And it is also through the field that, in dissociation, the past is denied its effect on the present, and the present is prevented from reshaping the past (see Stern ). To the extent that the field is frozen, it is our clinical intention to melt it; and in this process of addressing dissociation we melt time itself, allowing kairos to circulate freely once again.…”

“…I have had an interest in dissociation since the beginning of my career. Over the last few years I have also developed an interest in the matter of time in psychoanalysis (Stern , ). That second interest led me to the concept of Nachträglichkeit , first in the work of Modell, and eventually in the thinking of Laplanche and Faimberg.…”

Is there a Usable Heidegger for Psychoanalysts?

“…(To me, this time is like luck in The Three Penny Opera: "Denn alle rennen nach den Glueck; Das Glueck rennt hinterher" [Everyone is running after Luck, while Luck is running along behind them].) making their case, these critics apparently forget Freud's remarkable redefinition of memory (1914), and many later psychoanalytic descriptions of the reorganization of memory (see, e.g., Green 2002;D.B. Stern 2012;Modell 1990), the timelessness of the unconscious, après-coup, and the overlap of different time frames in psychic reality (Kafka 1989).…”

Patient-Analyst “Withness”: on Analytic “Presencing,” Passion, and Compassion in States of Breakdown, Despair, and Deadness

“…Even Orange's recent paper on the subject of compassion is, as she herself writes, "a more relational version of what I once called the psychoanalytic function of witness" (2006, p. 7). But while the term witness applies to an interaction between two subjectivities (Stern 2012; see also Reis's attempt to broaden the conception of witnessing, 2009a, 2009b), I wish to propose here the notion of psychoanalytic "withness"-the being there, within the experience of suffering, becoming at-one with it, in deep patient-analyst interconnectedness.…”