On Transience and the Sense of Temporal Continuity

OVER THE PAST FORTY YEARS, psychoanalysts have paid increasing attention to either end of the span of childhood years. At one end of this span the recent studies of infancy have altered our appreciation for the complexities of the neonate. The newborn, it has turned out, is far better organized than was postulated by psychoanalytic theory.

At the other end of the span of childhood years, Freud's (1916 [1915]) study of transience and Kohut's (1966) elaboration of the forms and transformations of narcissism have addressed some of the tasks of the adult years. The range of years during which psychological organization, reorganization, formation and transformation, takes place have been stretched from birth to death.

With respect to the adult years, Erikson's (1950) pioneering work still offers a perspective to which current investigators turn. His epigenetic model has been reevaluated in the light of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies by Gould (1978), Vailliant (1977) and others. Fitzpatrick and Friedman (1983) in their survey of this literature conclude:

The psychological issues a person wrestles with in all stages of his life invariably recur as he wrestles with new issues at later stages. Development may not be portrayed merely or primarily as a linear progression but needs to be viewed as a spiral or tapestry in which multiple interactions simultaneously link the past and the present. As a person labors with each stage, he simultaneously repeats, albeit in different terms, the issues of all prior stages. Therefore, adult development is at once similar to, different from, and an extension of childhood development (p. 411).

The conclusions reached by Fitzpatrick and Friedman are similar to the models of human development proposed by Gedo and Goldberg (1973), Loewald (1960), and Stolorow and Lachmann (1980). A theme shared by these authors is that adulthood entails the