The psychoanalytic situation can be usefully observed from the perspective of its specific temporal structure, consisting of a complex inter-connexion of different temporalities. I stress the importance of interpreting the mental events happening around the temporal boundaries between the analyst's consulting room and the outside world.

Time plays a key role in psychoanalysis—a process which is always terminated, while being intrinsically interminable—because bringing about change is one of its fundamental therapeutic functions and because the transference operates according to temporally-determined mechanisms, such as regression and repetition, involving the actualization of aspects of the past in the present.