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Time is most often symbolized by the clock. Yet if we enter a psychoanalytic dimension, we can also see the clock as standing for something more preliminary and prerequisite, as standing for the capacity to actually put time into symbolic form. Put differently we can ask, How is the psyche initialized in the first place so that it then becomes possible for time to be symbolized?

This formatting of a psychic space in which the meaning of the clock can be inscribed is what Moshe Halevi Spero refers to as the symbolification of time. Spero distinguishes symbolification and symbolization, finding in the issue of time and the clock an instance of what must be a larger question, namely, how the psyche becomes developmentally available for symbol generation. The implications of Spero's efforts for psychoanalytic theory are substantial. He explains that adequate symbol-formation, including the phallic symbol, requires a sufficiency of symbolified maternal and paternal objects.

In a remarkable clinical vignette, Spero shows the application of his theoretical understanding to the successful psychoanalysis of a woman who was a victim of childhood incest. Spero's patient, while fully able to live within and to understand the mechanics of time, had failed to internalize the objects necessary to provide temporal experience with adequate textures of vitality, subjective engagement, rhythmicity, and continuity. Bringing a Lacanian perspective, Spero finds that for his patient, time was circumscribed within the Real and was unavailable to the Symbolic Order.

In our next paper, the miasma in which we find ourselves as we think about time cedes to the comparative clarity that historical scholarship may seem to provide. Considering the available literature about the historical Jesus, Richard Chessick rejects Zaslow's psychodynamic concept of a “Jesus Christ syndrome,” finding no evidence to suppose that Jesus possessed anything like this putative disorder. Instead, Chessick believes that