The Experience of Time

Hans Loewald introduced the panel, commenting on the remarkable fact that this was our first panel on this subject. It takes considerable courage to deal with the elusive concept of time, which is, perhaps, incomprehensible to the human mind. Analytic contributions, despite some increase in recent years, have in any case been relatively scarce. Freud experienced frustration in his attempts to deal with the concept of time, and for Whitehead, meditation on time underlined the limitations of human intelligence. In psychoanalysis as a treatment procedure, as a research method, and as a body of theory, however, concepts and phenomena related to time are essential. Memory, forgetting, regression, repetition, anticipation, presentation, representation, the influence on the present of the past in terms of thought, feeling, and behavior; delay of gratification, sleep-wakefulness rhythms, variations and abnormalities in the sense of elapsed time; the so-called timelessness of the id; values, standards, ideals as future-oriented categories; concepts such as object constancy and self identity—all these are central in our work. Add to this the consideration of time in the psychoanalytic process, such as schedules and the ending of hours. Furthermore, psychoanalysis is unthinkable without the theory of evolution and ontogenesis of mental development. It is in the mainstream of contemporary science where the equal importance of the historical dimension in the natural and the social sciences is now recognized. In this context, Loewald referred to Toulmin and Goodfield's book, The Discovery of Time.1 Fixations, delays, detours, arrests, and developmental spurts are major factors in shaping mental life and its disturbances. Emotional reworking of developmental factors in the present leads to more harmonious, less disturbed integration of personality and thus, to some degree, to mastery over the shape of the present and of the future.

The title of the panel refers to the qu