You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I write on psychosis, pain, and time from a personal standpoint. I do not do a study, nor even review the literature. Rather, I reflect on my own experiences. As someone who has experienced psychosis, pain, and the passage of time, I can indeed speak from personal experience. Of course, I am an “n” of only one and others may have different experiences. So this is an opening of dialogue, and not an endpoint.
Time is an insult to our omnipotence. It tells us that we are finite beings, that there is an endpoint to our existence. We can control neither time's passing nor its ending. Time underscores our inability to control the unfolding of our lives. Time brings change and therefore anxiety about what is to come. It also means the end of what has passed: we are now in this moment and the moment passed is gone. In other words, the passage of time necessarily means loss, and implicates the pain of loss.
It is interesting how we experience time. It is, for example, well understood that time goes more slowly when one is young, and goes faster and faster the older we become. (Is this because any given length of time is a smaller portion of one's experience the longer one lives?) Time also goes slower the more bored one is, and faster the more one is in a place of enjoyment. Time can seem never-ending when one is in significant pain.
Perhaps the most significant passage of time is the passage into no longer living. We all die sometime, and the prospect of death is both painful—a cause of sadness—and humiliating—an injury to our narcissism. The loss of life is loss par excellence, but change can involve other losses as well: one's lover dies, one's children grow up and spend less time with one, one graduates and misses being a student. Of course, time can bring good developments too—one's marrying another, the birth of one's children, the deepening of a relationship.