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Time contains infinite worlds. As Gilles Deleuze (1988) stated, it is “a polyphony of polyphonies.” In this essay I explore ideas of time in the work of Sándor Ferenczi, with the aim of clarifying and furthering his “metapsychology of the analyst's mental process during analysis” (Ferenczi, 1928/1994, p. 98). Here I argue that ideas of time in the psychoanalytic process function as meta-constructions: they organize the scene. As the word suggests, I derive the term from Freud's “Constructions in Analysis” (1937). Meta-constructions are the grids within which analysts, like archaeologists, place other constructions during the analytic session. In the case of time, such grids have two aspects: an artisanal one, through which the analyst works time into specific sessions, and a theoretical one, through which the analyst elucidates the idea of time on which the sessions rest. As Jacob Arlow wrote, “Hardly any other profession functions in as intimate and consistent an involvement with time as does psychoanalysis. Considerations of time figure prominently in every aspect of our work” (1986, p. 507).
Yet, although in recent decades psychoanalysts have reflected often on temporality and analysis, André Green (2000, 2009) spoke strongly about the distortions that time suffered in psychoanalytic theory.1 To address what Green specifically referred to as the “ignorance of time,” the “murder of time,”