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The experience of time is the essence of human existence. It sounds like an idle, metaphysical statement. Yet, on reading this outstanding collection of seven essays we may accept that the basic human conflict addressed by psychoanalysis is the one between the subjective, experiential times, of diverse speeds and directions, and the abstract, linear, objectified, chronological time in which we live socially.
In his theoretical essay, ‘The Construction of Heterochronicity’, André Green offers us a panorama of these experiential times and their role in structuring the mind. He takes us through the development of Freud's notions of time at different stages in his thinking beginning with Studies on Hysteria where fixation is described as a block in the flow of mental time. But Freud does not remain within a linear notion of time, and is already putting forward a ‘structural’ view of time in the notion of trauma as a complex temporal arrangement; in Green's words, ‘trauma is … “filed” in concentric layers of memory crossed by radiated side paths’, suggesting “… a transchronic functioning” … represented from a synchronic perspective of time in psychotherapy' (p. 2, para 1). Transchronic can be understood, I'd suggest, as an image of a cross-section of the mind, as of a tree-trunk, a structural expression of the coexistence of memories of different times organized as