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Take the large words of the title of this book out of context for a moment and the scope of the enterprise feels dizzying - which might not be the frivolous response it appears, but a pointer to how ambitious a project this book is and that it will make demands. The book's epigraph should be noted as a warning: ‘Einstein said: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once”’. This deceptively simple statement leaves you puzzling over the questions it raises, and the complexities and mysteries implicit in the title. Fortunately, Rosine Jozef Perelberg is generous with her explanations, as well as a meticulous guide through Freudian metapsychology and, specifically here, his conception of psychic space and time.
At the outset the author makes clear her belief that psychoanalysis has made a revolutionary contribution to ‘the modern understanding of time and space in the constitution of the individual’ (p. 3). Mystics and poets have always expressed the difficulties which time and space present and how intense the longing for an escape from them can be. Is it not an attempt to resolve the intractable when Blake writes: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour’ (Blake, 1988)? Or Crashaw's ‘Welcome, all wonders in one sight! Eternity shut in a span’? (Crashaw, 1973). Such ideas seem to speak to the wish for time and space to cease because they cause human beings to suffer, they deny them satisfaction.
In taking on time, space and phantasy, Perelberg is bringing into focus the nexus of concepts underpinning Freudian thinking as she grapples with complex and elusive processes of mind. For all the abstractions of the title, the book is of course rooted in clinical practice so, once the intricacies of theory have been unpacked, there are several chapters presenting this psychoanalytic understanding in action in the consulting room. Perelberg comes well equipped for t