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In the posthumous work Holding and Interpretation (1986), Donald W. Winnicott presents narrative material from the two-year psychoanalysis of a schizoid-depressive patient. This patient created a potentially defeating atmosphere within the treatment situation by virtue of his boring monologue, his dissociative-like and apparently aimless mental state, and his tendency to fall asleep during sessions. In a preliminary communication (1954), apparently written with this patient in mind, Winnicott observed that the need to sustain a patient during prolonged periods of incomprehensibility included the provision of a “time factor” (p. 263) somehow missing in the patient. As his patient gradually became more aware of the object relational emptiness and searching he was expressing through sleeping, Winnicott found an opportunity to present the following interpretation (1986, p. 125):
Patient: For the first time I feel that I am here myself. That means that I was unaware of time at the end of the last session. I got carried away.
Analyst: Your true self has its own “time,” in contrast to your false self which keeps in touch with clocks.
That is, while the false self may have succeeded in latching on to the superficial significance of the notches on the clock, the more authentic quality of this individual's sense of time was expressed through the moribund lacunae in time carved out by his couch sleep. It was precisely the patient's dramatically “anachronous” episodes of sleep that revealed the hidden, true temporal dimensions of his childhood privations.
Such treatment phenomena are far from uncommon, and their challenge to the psychoanalyst is particularly great since disturbances of time inevitably impact upon the analytic frame itself (see Ogden, 1994, p. 123; Spero, 1993). In the present essay, I wish to examine the role played by the clock