Psychoanalytic Speculations on the Subjectivity of Time: The Prison of the Present

Freud noted that “our perception of time is derived from the method of working of the system Pcpt.-Cs. (perceptual- connections) and to correspond to a perception on its own part of that method of working” (1920b 1957, p. 28). A few years later he described a small contrivance, a ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’ that was a writing tablet from which notes can be erased by an easy movement of the hand, and he considered its similarities with the system Pcpt. -Cs.(Freud, 1957, p.231) Freud wrote:

My theory was that cathectic innervations are sent out and withdrawn in rapid periodic impulses from within into the completely pervious system Pcpt.-Cs. So long as that system is cathected in this manner, it receives perceptions (which are accompanied by consciousness) and passes the excitation on to the unconscious mnemic systems; but as soon as the cathexis is withdrawn, consciousness is extinguished and the functioning of the system comes to a standstill.

According to Freud, the unconscious, like an exploratory agent, sends out feelers through the medium of the system Pcpt. -Cs. to the external world to gather a sample of the excitations coming from it, and very quickly withdraws from them. This discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs., Freud guesses, “lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time” (p. 231). But the question is: What are these feelers of the unconscious? Where is the external world? Is it the external of the unconscious or of the individual? What are these excitations? And how do they relate to the concept of time?

These are questions that were not fully answered by Freud, but perhaps a serious contemplation of them could help us to arrive at a solution of the riddle of time and space from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. It seems clear that the unconscious is not just an undefined place but is an intelligent system that issues commands, and that the system Pcpt. -Cs. acts as its executive agent. Freud merges two topographic and structural views