Psychoanalytic practice has tacitly assumed the existence of an absolute and objective temporal matrix in which physical, biological and psychological processes take place and to which the subjective time of the patient in therapy gets gradually attuned. But psychoanalytic thought does not demand an ontology of absolute frameworks independent of man but only an epistemology in which several visions of reality are traditional.

This paper reformulates the concept of time so as to accommodate three demands which appear to be mutually exclusive. The new concept of time (1) eliminates the need for assuming that it is a feature of the world independent of man, (2) retains the advantage of the heuristic assumption that, to first approximation, there does exist an objective passage of time and (3) does not contradict the teachings of other sciences about time.