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We know that the psychoanalyst questions the past. A conference entitled Psychoanalysis: questions for tomorrow1 sought to inverse his first vocation of predicting the past and to encourage him to listen to the future, to pose questions for tomorrow. In fact, such a purpose is profoundly analytic; for, from the very first encounter, there arises an acutely important question, or wager, for this tomorrow that is already present – namely, the issue of the end of the treatment.
Temporality, in the form of the pressure of the past, the present of the setting and the project of the end, is at the heart of analytic treatment. Yet, along with Freud, ‘we have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves “timeless”. This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them’ (S. E. XVIII, 28).
From the philosopher to the scientist to the mystic, yesterday as well as today, the notion of time has haunted man's thought in search of a better knowledge of the world and of himself. The research is crucial but the answers disappointing: ‘For there is nothing more feeble than the discourse of those who wish to define these primitive words … time is of this sort. Who can define it?’, asks Pascal. Indeed, is it not absurd to want to define something that is at once the ‘movement of a thing’ and the ‘measure of the movement’? Time can only be intelligible, says Pascal by means of the geometric spirit, ‘because nature herself has already given us, without words, a clearer knowledge’ (Pascal, 1658). Only the analyst is not a geometrician and, what is more, he cannot do without words. Analytic ideas of the importance of Bion's or Lacan's have nonetheless culminated in formulations belonging to the mathematical order; and, as we pointed out to René Thom, ‘doing geometry’ is a requisite of retrogressive thinking.