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The basic concept of time is related to the occurrence of events, between which, when not simultaneous, there exists a lapse that we call an interval of time. The physical events conventionally chosen to determine the unity of time have been the earth's rotation on its own axis, or its rotation around the sun: solar time. However, other time measures in physics have been developed when they become new verifiable events, as is the case of atomic time, based on the quantum changes of the permanent equilibrium–non-equilibrium of matter (Reichenbach, 1959).
The relativity of time depends both on the occurrence of events that limit their intervals and on the characteristics with which they are registered (Landau & Rumer, 1970). Time sense, i.e. the sense of the passage or happening of time, is a relation between the registrator and his environment.
Within the concept of the passage of time, the present, which separates past from future, is the instant in which what was undetermined becomes determined; therefore the actual happening of an event is equal to becoming determined or fixed in time. If the experience of the human being take place in the present, each thinking act defines a point of reference in time.
In this paper I refer mainly to time as a psychic phenomenon. Freud (1920), (1924), (1925) pointed out that the idea we have of this phenomenon begins in the auto-perception of the alternate psychic energy which, from the unconscious, enables the conscious-perceptual apparatus to register stimuli.
This energy, when placed and withdrawn rhythmically from the unconscious on to the perceptual apparatus, suggests an organically rooted phenomenology that represents the link between biological time rhythms and those of nature in general. The trace of this inherited rhythm is imprinted on each organ of the economy in its physiological work–rest cycles. The inherited phylogenetic rhythm is expressed in the central nervous system in the sleep–wakefulness cycle and also