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It is difficult for all of us who practise psychoanalysis to realize how obscure this subject is to people who are not used to attaching any importance to the problems of thought, or who are not used to thinking at all. In the psychoanalytic world we have our own divisions of time; we talk about periods like infancy, childhood, adolescence, middle age, old age, puberty, and so on. All that is so familiar to us that it is hard to realize that there are many people who are not familiar with those ways of marking the passage of time.
I want to consider periods of mental time which we can recognize, but which others who are not familiar with our world cannot recognize so easily. Although people are familiar with terms like ‘puberty’, even ‘latency periods’, they are not used to regarding them as actual experiences of the passage of time in the way in which we count 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 10 a.m., 23.00 hours, 24.00 hours. Some of these periods, like infancy, childhood, puberty, are times when human beings often undergo mental perturbation. Being unfamiliar with that world they are frightened at what is going on. These conditions are not diseases; nor are they illnesses. Puberty, old-age, youth, adolescence – none of them is an illness, although they often are periods in which dis-ease is experienced. Nevertheless, mental experiences are common-place during certain of those recognizable periods – recognizable, that is to say, to psychoanalysts and a few others. But they are none of them illnesses except by analogy. During those periods people will have an experience, say, of nightmares; they become frightened of nightmares. They may even speak of these experiences to their relatives – brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers – and make them frightened too. The fear is communicable. If the anxiety is sufficiently stirred up and communicated they will say they want to see a doctor, or a psychiatrist,
or a psychoanalyst. This becomes significant if the nightmare is experienced b