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To our profession, in which time is a major tool as well as a tyrant who rules almost by the minute, the title of this book is very promising, expressing as it does the reality of a dimension of our work and lives as well as a state of being with which we are all probably familiar in ourselves and our patients. However, the author's introductory statement—‘This is a book about time as a psychoanalyst sees it’—points the analytical psychologist at once both to the book's considerable riches and to its obvious defects, most particularly in the area of sychronicity, a Jungian concept that is being used extensively in many other disciplines with little acknowledgement being paid to Jung for his idea.
The book is encyclopaedic in scope, and explores many areas from the relationship between psychopathology and the awareness of time to the locus in the brain of circadian time. The author can only be admired for his range of scholarship, drawing as he does on psychoanalysis, physics, biology, neurology, psychopharmacology and phenomenology. In addition to an abundance of quotations from literature, the book is peppered generously with clinical vignettes, although I often found them too brief and insufficiently set in a context.
Out of the book's fifteen chapters I shall select for comment a few, which I found particularly interesting, namely chapters 2, 5, and 12. Chapter 2 is entitled ‘Time and the Self: from Bergson and Heidegger to Piaget’. It is a difficult chapter since it attempts to trace the influence of the phenomenological school of philosophy on Piaget and to map out the psychophysical determinants of time in the experience of the developing infant. Bergson was a French philosopher and psychologist who struggled to reconcile free will and determinism, the inner and the outer, and who thought of time as ‘abstract’ in terms of science in general and as ‘real’ in terms of experience. This idea was elaborated by Piaget, who considered that a sense of time emerges at ab