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Organized and chaired by Irene Cairo, the panel “It's about Time: Temporality in Analysis” would obviously, given the vast implications of the topic, have to be constrained by the interests and special competencies of the panelists: Haydée Faimberg, Donnel Stern, and Warren Poland. Cairo introduced the subject with the well-known words of St. Augustine: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know, but if I try to explain it to someone who asks, I know not.”
Acknowledging the difficulty of framing in a brief introduction the panelists' diverse presentations, Cairo chose to start by drawing a contrast between, on the one hand, the way philosophers and physicists have written about time and, on the other, the way we analysts have come to think about it. Noting that the theory of relativity undermined the concept of absolute time, Cairo stated that, by contrast, we analysts speak of a “time arrow.” We do distinguish past, present, and future, and note the complex relation between time, memory, and history: our contributions range from Freud's notion of the timelessness of the unconscious, implicit in the repetition compulsion, through the hypothesis of the origin of our subjective perception of time and the relationship with memory, as in “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad”’ (Freud 1925), to Nachträglichkeit, the powerful idea of resignification that challenges simple linear conceptions. Referring to trauma in particular, Cairo wondered whether we might say that psychic events exist in a perpetual present.
She outlined Laplanche's idea of the four levels of time: level 1, cosmological time; level 2, perceptual time, the time of immediate consciousness; level 3, the time of memory and the individual project, a level