A Clinical View on the Directions of Time: Here and Now, the Past in the Present, from the Present to the Past1

The nature of time and psychic function is one of the most clinically complex, intriguing, and debated issues in psychoanalysis (Birksted-Breen, 2003; Faimberg, 2007; Good, 1998). In introducing the panel, Dr. Antoine Corel noted that in Freud's various writings involving the problem of psychic time there were two aspects. The first concerns the nature of the traces left by psychic events, in particular those that were never conscious and so could not be recollected but still had psychic effect. These might be constructed by the analyst and thereby serve to ‘recover a fragment of lost experience.’ The second aspect concerns the fundamental concept of après-coup [Nachträglichkeit] as a dialectical relationship between two times, a second time leaning on, and giving retroactive meaning to, a first time.

The first paper, given by Michael I. Good, was entitled The present in the past: A presumptive ‘case of childhood incest’ as seen through the lens of screen reconstruction. Although Freud considered unconscious mental processes to be timeless - with past, present, and future representationally merged - unconscious mechanisms may still act defensively upon the demarcation of time either in the memory of experience or in the (re)construction of the past. Just as formerly recalled screen memories may be remembered again in the course of psychoanalysis, so new screen phenomena can arise during the treatment process. Screen (re)construction is a type of screening with inputs from both patient and analyst that can shift the focus away from intense here-and-now interactions of the analytic present to the patient's past. A mutually determined process, both patient and analyst gradually consider the resulting screen to be convincing and valid, even though it may, for the most part, be significantly distorted or fictitious due to the screen function. Like a screen memory having some veridical content yet serving a masking function, a screen construction could have elements of tru