Man as Timekeeper

Today I am persuaded, more than ever, that a whole series of psychopathological manifestations can be understood and examined more thoroughly from the vantage of the phenomenon of time….1,^{p. 8}

Levi Strauss referred to myths as “instruments for the obliteration of time.”2, ^{p. 16} Many neurotic and even psychotic processes can likewise be viewed as ways of defending against the passage of time, of creating the illusion that time does not move, that it is circular, or that it can be stopped at will. How difficult it is for a person to view time as genuinely and relentlessly proceeding is reflected in our cultural, philosophical, and religious history. We seek to obliterate time because its passage represents the inexorable approach of our confrontation with death, and yet time is the precious template upon which we experience life. The way time is used and experienced by patients and by psychotherapists therefore has unusual significance. Therapeutic temporality is a condensation of many existential and unconscious themes related to anxiety in general, and death anxiety in particular.

There has been a consistent development in Western philosophical conceptions which may be of use to the psychotherapist. Increasingly, Western philosophers have come to view man as subject, in fact, in some senses author, of time, rather than as merely an object embedded in abstract time. Just as the Copernican revolution was helping us recognize our rather trivial position in the vast spatial world, the Kantian revolution was helping us recognize our more central position in the temporal order of the universe. Man is seen as constituting time, not merely existing in it from a philosophical point of view. Clinically, many patients experience themselves as helpless victims of the passage of time, and they mobilize defenses designed to create the illusion that time is not passing by making any unfamiliar situation in the present or future seem identical to all-too-familiar ones in the past. Th