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As the subtitle of the book indicates, this is a psychoanalytic inquiry into the developmental and clinical aspects of man's temporal experience. Hartocollis had already ventured into this little known field in the psychoanalytic literature, and with this book he is expanding and integrating his views expressed in three previously published articles. What particularly distinguishes this slim volume is the broad scholarship forming the background of its premises and seen, not only in the organization of the material and the numerous quotations from a large range of sources, but also in the authority and elegance of the author's style.
Psychological or absolute time is the subjectively experienced time in contrast to mathematical time, objective and measurable by clock or calendar. Bergson's statement 'There is no other thing in time than change itself' is supported by William James when he says: 'Awareness of change is the condition on which our perception of time's flow depends'. In its experimental sense time constitutes the unifying element of consciousness, ascribing unity to our perceptions in a world of constant change. The subjective sense of time and the awareness of time as a feature of external reality are functions of consciousness itself. The developmental underpinnings of these functions and their vicissitudes in different pathological or otherwise altered states of the self, constitute the scope and topic of Hartocollis' book. The book is divided into fifteen chapters, the first five containing Hartocollis' theoretical propositions while, in the remaining ten, clinical material is used ot underscore and explicate the multiple facets of temporal experience.
Time as duration and time as perspective are the two distinct categories of the subjective temporal experience. Time as duration is the earliest, more