On the Experience of Time and its Dynamics, with Special Reference to Affects—Discussion

IN A SERIES OF PAPERS over the last several years (1972), (1973), (1974), Dr. Hartocollis is attempting no less than a richer understanding of the nature of affective life in its relation to time, a dimension of conscious and preconscious experience filled with paradoxes and contradictions. Inevitably, he touches upon the enigma of man's apprehension of the ultimate unknown—death itself.

Dr. Hartocollis begins with certain basic assumptions derived from his clinical experience. He suggests that time as duration—the experience of time as slow or fast (time apart from the self)—is a function of the strength of our instinctual wishes, and a metaphor for the integrity of the self and its ties with the world of internal objects. Second, time as perspective or tense (internal time, an aspect of the self-representation) is an inherent dynamic of all affective experience beyond the elementary states of pleasure and pain. In other words, tension between a coherent self aiming for pleasure and relief from unpleasure, and those object representations—more or less internalized—that are sought for these purposes leads to the awareness of duration, is accompanied by affective experience,