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The psychology of time is a fascinating subject. The human being's ability to measure time objectively, structured around the earth's rotation, must be reckoned as one of the great achievements of the secondary process. Written history, economic development (the ability to measure labor objectively), and scientific progress are in turn all based on this achievement. Psychoanalytic case histories1 have demonstrated how very difficult it is for some to relinquish control over time to the objective world. Acknowledging the sovereignty of time is experienced as dangerous because it threatens the individual with the re-experiencing of early traumatic separations and the resurgence of sexual and aggressive wishes beyond the control of the ego. From such cases we realize how much narcissistic renunciation must have taken place before the concept of objective time was achieved.
Psychoanalysis deals primarily with subjective time. Time moves quickly in the good hour and slowly in depression and boredom. For some, analysis takes place outside of time; even the years of treatment become vague. Others must look at their watch during the hour, for they are afraid to relinquish time to the analyst. Poets have anthropomorphized time. Shakespeare says that "… never resting time leads summer on/To hideous winter, and confounds him there." And Milton rages against "blind fury with the abhorrent shears who slits the thin span of life." In this bitter literature about time Freud's little essay on transience2 stands out, for he believed that the limitation on the duration of any enjoyment raises the value of that enjoyment. Had eternal spring and youth been granted to us, as it was to the Olympian gods, we would not be able to cherish them the way we do. Freud concludes that we cannot enjoy the transience of beauty without the capacity to mourn.
Schiffer sees time as "the earliest target for liquidation," antedating and rivaling in significance the oedipus complex. The book