The Unpast, by Dominique Scarfone

The Unpast by Dominique Scarfone is one of the most important and disturbing books that I have read in recent years. Important, because it is a profound examination of the meaning of “timelessness” in the unconscious—indeed, of the meaning of the unconscious itself—and the place and role of time in psychoanalysis, psychic development and the psychoanalytic cure. Disturbing, because it is a close—and I would say brilliant—reading of Freud that promises to return his thinking to its most innovative, creative and radical frontiers. It unveils the extent to which this discomfiting Freud, the true Copernican genius who challenges our more timid Ptolomeic sensibilities and ways of looking at the world, has been inadvertently put aside as psychoanalysis has drifted away from a head-on confrontation with the ineffable, enigmatic and ultimately unknowable towards a more “rational” and seemingly “knowable” sense of what we can expect to encounter in the patients’ unconscious and what the “familiar” paths to that discovery will be.

Surely, this is a bold, perhaps even presumptuous claim, one that Scarfone, who writes with a scholarly and at times poetic demeanour, does not himself advance directly. However, one cannot follow his carefully crafted description of Freud's metapsychology to its logical conclusions, as he reminds readers of the original meaning and implications of such now ordinary and familiar terms as “remembering,” “repetition,” “action,” and “transference” without realizing the extent to which psychoanalysis has moved away from Freud’s truly revolutionary vision to a still powerful and yet tamer, more reason-based, psychological rather than psychoanalytic perspective.

The starting point for this contemporary “return to Freud,” which in this volume consists of four linked and carefully integrated essays—A Matter of Time; Repetition: Between Presence and Meaning; In the Hollow of the Transference; and The Unpast, the latter given as one of the two main reports of T