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Henry Markman provided opening remarks concerning the various conceptions of time in psychoanalytic theory and clinical work. Psychoanalytic time is non-linear and discontinuous. Artists have vividly depicted subjective temporality. Joyce's character in Ulysses comments on Moses never entering the Promised Land: “He died with a great future behind him.” Joyce's masterpiece captures the interpenetration of past, present and future in each moment, often reversing the usual causal chain of time. Markman noted that Joyce's novel is a universe in a single day, where time is the central protagonist, ordered by the subject's (Bloom and Stephen's) unconscious. To quote Ulysses again: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.” Might we not say the same of psychoanalysis? The here-and-now in the session is such a moment, where multiple dimensions of time saturate the present and are ordered by the analysand's unconscious.
Markman noted the various meanings of the past in analytic discourse: as fact, i.e. as material reality; as historical truth; as evolving narrative; as repetition in the transference. Does the analysand acquire a past, a history through the course of analysis, and is this a central aspect of therapeutic action? Is this what we mean by construction? Or does he or she acquire an increasing repertoire of narratives and an altered, decentered relation to her unconscious? And what role does the analyst play which allows for the experience of past, present and future in each session in such a way that these links can be articulated?
The past as resistance can be viewed from the perspective of analysand: how he uses stories to close off the emergence of new experience or a deeper affective contact with past experiences. From the analyst's side, she may use the past as a safe place to engage the patient, especially during heightened transference moments or periods of uncertainty.
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