Time and History in Psychoanalysis1

When addressing a topic so all embracing of human experience as time and history, the concept of relativity becomes most useful. The notion of things being fixed either in time, in memory, in an order, in a particular direction necessarily gets dispensed with. Human variables are ever changing. Our views of the past, of history, whether collective or individual can change in accordance with our subjectivity. The physical world itself is not a fixed entity, although we would like to believe it is.

Harold Blum in his introduction states, ‘Time is a creation of the human mind.’ It is created out of experiences of pleasure and pain, gratification and frustration. It may go fast or it may pass slowly. Past, present and future are concepts evolving from these experiences. We are victims of our senses though we adapt to clock time, the rotations of the earth, and the evolution of the present into the future. Psychoanalysis imposes a timed frame and termination is the first limit. Memory and fantasy manipulate our subjective sense of time. The notion that time is unidirectional is generally accepted. The unconscious on the other hand, is timeless. The unconscious past is not past as it persists into the present until it has been analyzed.

The first paper, given by Alberto C. Cabral, was entitled ‘From a past that condemns, to a history that allows’. Addressing Freud's statement that ‘Only nachträglich have become traumas’ (1895, p. 356) Cabral notes there is a distinction between differing translations of the Freudian concept of nachträglich. The Strachey definition differs from the Etcheverry in that it postulates a pre-existent cause that becomes known only after a later ‘moment’ in which the ‘deferred effect’ becomes explicable by association to the causal moment. This suggests a linear forward-moving conception of time. The second moment conjures up the first moment which is the original traumatic cause. The ‘before … holds the explanation of the after’.

The second transla