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Comparing the theme of psychic temporality with perlaboration1 (or working through) seems to be necessary. Perlaboration - a term that has been chosen to render both the meaningfulness of its reference to the psychic work and the force conveyed by the prefix durch - is a concept designating a condition of the psychic work which analytic treatment can activate. Stemming from within the psychoanalytic clinical work and being one of its specific expressions, it can unfold through sublimation as well as the work of culture, Kulturarbeit. In the latter case, its modulations need to be tracked and thought again.
If we consider the existence of a working-through space and time, in the analyst just as in the patient - but in the analyst before the patient - the therapeutic work can become fully analytic.
From the very first encounter with the patient, the analyst, changed by the experience of his own analysis, is able to create an expanded temporal dimension, first of all within himself. Such dimension - a suspension of all actions - activates the perlaboration that will then take place in a diverse temporal domain, so foreign to the patient, hence difficult to accept. After all, one of the essential aspects of the analytic treatment - that is, its frequency in time, in the week's and year's time that is socially paced - is defined by how perlaboration works. The analytic sessions flow in parallel with the time passing between them at a certain pace. The value of this pace has been largely demonstrated (Conrotto, 2010). Also the time interval between sessions, as we know - three, four, five sessions per week - is a time that becomes fully a part of the multilayered temporality of the analytic treatment. This temporality is delineated and defined by the