You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning
—T. S. Eliot1
WHAT MAKES EXPERIENCE ENDURABLE or otherwise has at least something to do with knowing that there will be a time to it. Pleasure or unpleasure alike are qualified by the time they take. Can there be any pleasure so great as to survive its being ceaseless and endless? Is there any ordinary pain that cannot be endured if one knows that there will be an end to it?
To any experience, time is therefore a party. It accompanies experience dressed variously as ever and never; no longer and not yet; as beginning, ongoing, and ending; as soon or now or later; as quick or slow; as again and again or as never again. It is by no means clear how the sense of time evolves, only that to an extent it does.2 As analysts, we are certainly occupied with it: minutes per session, times per week, punctuality and tardiness, duration of the analysis, timing of interpretations, and much more. In a sense this occupation reflects the suspicion that our patients are insufficiently attuned to time—that the timelessness of the unconscious, and more specifically of the primary process that Freud dealt with at the start of his psychoanalytic formulations and of the analysis interminable that occupied him at the end, remain monitory touchstones for us. Indeed throughout Freud's work weaves the sinuous issue of time. It is in the genetic formulations, the idea of phase-development, the concept of regression, at the heart of the idea of transference, in the repetition compulsion, the death instinct, and even in the idea of Nirvana. Such ubiquity certainly underscores the frangibility of peoples' sense of time.