Chapter 20 Where is Here? When is Now?

If I say, like many and diverse colleagues, that I try to work in the ‘here and now’ I may conjure up, as well as some contemporary disputes (about which more later), some bits of history about place and time in psychoanalysis. As early as the Project (Freud 1895a) Freud discovered, in relation to problems in his seduction theory, that the place with the more determining role in the patient’s illness was not external reality but psychic reality with its unconscious phantasies. He developed his psychoanalytic method also through changes he made with regard to time. His earlier techniques aimed to bring ‘directly into focus the moment at which the symptom was formed’ (Freud 1914: 147); the analyst tried to help the patient fill the gaps in his memory – to remember how it happened ‘there and then’. Later, with the discovery of transference and the compulsion to repeat, Freud found a different relation of time between ‘there and then’ and ‘here and now’ – through the phenomenon of transference the past repeats itself in the present and in a psychoanalysis becomes ‘a piece of real life’ (Freud 1914: 152) that is ‘at every point accessible to our intervention’ (Freud 1914: 154). Freud tells us ‘… we must treat [the patient’s] illness, not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force (Freud 1914: 151). All this has implications for analytic technique: the analyst’s evenly suspended attention, as I understand it, hovers over, and has a focus on, illuminating psychic reality, while material reality in kept in relative darkness (not darkness, mark you, but relative darkness).

This shifting of analytic focus from external (or practical or material reality as Freud also sometimes called it) to psychic reality was later deepened and extended by Klein’s discovery of a whole inner realm of objects, an unconscious world within that is in interplay with

external reality. And later still, the Kleinian understanding of the role of projective identification between patient and