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‘Can it be said that there was there ever a stage in Freud's work when he ceased to be concerned by the subject of time? One would be inclined to doubt it’ (p. 21).
This is the major idea inspiring both the present title and the author's previous work, La diachronie en psychanalyse (Green, 2000). In each of these Green affirms, demonstrates and expounds a point of view he has long defended—namely, that ‘the real object of psychoanalysis is temporality’ (1990).
Le temps éclaté is an extension of La diachronie en psychanalyse, which brings together essays of his published over the last thirty years on the questions of time, temporality and diachrony (temporal evolution) in psychoanalysis. These questions lead the author to tackle, by turns, a number of different concepts related to such subjects as primal experience (primal fantasies), repetition (repetition-compulsion), infantile life, remembering and death.
In the present work we find a review of the different hypotheses that, stretching back to the very beginnings of Freud's work, today constitute ‘a complex theoretical ensemble on temporality’. We see Green also put forward a ‘heterogeneous’ and ‘diachronic’ conception of temporality in psychoanalysis—a temporality that he describes as ‘exploded’,1 the term being used by him to both justify and summarise the book's central thesis.
From a metapsychological as well as from a clinical standpoint, Le temps éclaté is an important work in view of the rigorous theoretical argument that underpins its central propositions. Moreover, throughout the book the author takes care to ensure that these propositions resonate with the experience of treatment and, in particular, the treatment of ‘non-neurotic’ states or those that are ‘outside neurosis’.
In constructing his work on two revolutionary hypotheses—the existence of the