The author departs from the assumption that, in the paranoid-schizoid condition, the past is omnipresent, while the future appears as the end of all time. The experience of time comes about only as a result of the conflicts of the depressive position. However, the depressive position can be achieved only when mourning, guilt, and loss allow for a feeling of separateness (the withdrawal of the projections).

Weiss wants to show that the feeling of timelessness indicates a denial of separateness, and that patients try to re-create a sense of timelessness within the analysis in order to avoid the conflicts of the depressive position. He suggests that the emergence of psychic space precedes the experience of time; hence, the first task of the analyst is to create this psychic space. Transference, in his view, is