The Experience of Time

ContributorsIngeborg Bornholdt, Andre Green, Charles Hanly, Otto Kernberg, Jose E. Milmaniene, Michael Parsons, Rosine Perelberg, Janine Puget, Satish Reddy, Jean-Claude RollandIn 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.

Jorge Canestri, M.D, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst. Training and supervising analyst for the Italian Psychoanalytical Association and for the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. Mary S. Sigourney Award recipient 2004. Professor of Psychology of Health at the Roma 3 University. Editor of the Educational Section of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. President of the Italian Psychoanalytical Association. Has published numerous psychoanalytical papers in books and reviews including 'Language, Symbolisation and Psychosis'. Leticia Glocer Fiorini is a training psychoanalyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. She is the author of 'The Feminine and the Complex Thought', 'Deconstructing the Feminine: Psychoanalysis, Gender and Theories of Complexity', and editor of 'The Other in the Intersubjective Field' and 'Time, History and Structure. A Psychoanalytical Approach'. Among other contributions in psychoanalytic journals she has published 'The enigma of the sexual difference', in 'Feminine Scenarios"'; 'Assisted fertilization, new problems' in 'Prevention in Mental Health'; 'The sexed body and the real, its meaning in transsexualism' in 'Masculine Scenarios'; 'Psychoanalysis and Gender, Convergences and Divergences' in 'Psychoanalysis and Gender Relations'; and 'The bodies of present-day maternity' in 'Motherhood in the Twenty-first Century'.

This book's hypothesis is that psychoanalysis revolutionizes the common conception of time, similar to the revolution in physics. While it does not ignore the 'psychological time arrow' no doubt distinguishing past, present and future, psychoanalysis reveals that in analytic experience, time acquires diverse formations in which these distinctions become more complex and fade until they take the shape of what Andre Green, in a felicitous expression, calls 'le temps eclate' ['exploded time'].