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“At a certain point, the past becomes timeless. It’s not a problem of nostalgia, but the past freezes, there is a kind of timelessness”. Modiano 1923 (my translation)
Time, memory, the uncanny, après-coup, Nachträglichkeit, après-coup, deferred action.
Time is untouchable and unreachable. It is the background to our experiences and memories of the past, our phantasies and desires for the future, and our lived present. It is forever shifting in our senses and perspectives. At times, it becomes fixed, submerging us in a timeless world that never changes, of fixed memories and recollection of traumatic events; at others, its plasticity and “elasticity” translate into a vertiginous experience (Bronstein 2024). It makes us aware of our mortality, although we can cancel this out by replacing it with a belief in our immortality. It can possess a linear quality, yet it can also evoke a sense of circularity. Our perception of time can change dramatically according to our state of mind. Time marks the separation and separateness from the object, as well as growth and death. However, the interplay of conscious and unconscious phantasies and anxieties, as well as the timelessness of the unconscious – where time does not exist – can present a different reality in our imagination, memories, and dreams, where the dead may reappear or we remain infants. The relationship we establish with “objective” time can feel vastly different from one person to another. We might try to search for explanations and reasons for our conflicts in our history, but we might neglect the idea that we are subjected to the impact of our unconscious phantasies or to what Pontalis sees as the living and inexhaustible source of the infantile (Pontalis 1997).
Understanding this subject is far from easy. We meet the necessity of understanding the development and meaning of what is subjectively felt and can be phenomenologically described, as well as to try to establish the meta-psychological foundations of psychi