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Here is a book that will stimulate reflection and research on one of today's most urgent and engaging themes, our relationship with time. Angeliki Yiassemides embarked on an in-depth analysis of the question of time in analytical psychology and psychoanalysis in her first book (2013). With this second book, she develops her exploration and reflection in the company of brilliant clinicians and researchers specializing in a variety of fields.
How can we tear, lift, or go beyond the thin curtain that separates eternity from our ordinary time, or times? This is the question with which Yiassemides, quoting Isaac Asimov's novel The End of Eternity, introduces her chapter. It could be the epigraph of any one of the varied chapters. She approaches it by discussing synchronicity, one of the Jungian themes that is most difficult to learn, teach, explore and develop. Yiassemides identifies and analyses those moments when an opening, another relationship to outer events and ourselves, suddenly occurs. She wonders about an occurrence that must be approached with the most rapt attention; those dreams that seem, at least in retrospect, to have said something about the future. To qualify them as premonitory or prophetic would be inappropriate, however, she observes, for this would limit us to a linear conception of time, to searching upstream for causes of events, and thus blind us to their role in becoming.
By speaking classically of ‘teleology’, Yiassemides conforms to a whole body of Jungian teaching, but there is a risk that this terminology implies a ‘telos’, a goal for the processes that are occuring. She avoids this trap by emphasising that the future is something to live in the present, as one dimension of a process that is always unfolding. This dynamic is especially likely to manifest in dreams that she prefers to call ‘prospective’, possibly anticipating what is to come.
And she points out that Jung's progress on these subjects took place in the context of post-Einsteini