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The author differentiates between the relatively agreeable feeling of timelessness (in tension-free moments) and the standstill of time, which he understands as first experienced in a traumatic situation of breakdown—caused by a sense of overwhelming helplessness
in the face of a chronically unavailable, intrusive, or dead object (Bion)—and later unconsciously activated in defense against the reexperience of this traumatic breakdown. The standstill of time corresponds to a psychic fixation on the trauma; however, the trauma is immortal as long as it is not understood (Gutwinski-Jeggle). Schmithüsen states that, in the analytic situation, the phenomena of a standstill of time first occur in the countertransference of the analyst, and reflect the patient's annihilation anxiety and fear of psychic death.
Utilizing a clinical example, the author shows how he worked with a patient who gave him a sense of a horrible nameless dread and a psychophysical numbness. The patient's way of talking without interruption put the analyst into a state of confusion, mental shutdown, and made time stand still. After many years of analysis, the patient became aware that he could not differentiate between himself and his analyst. He felt that he approached his analyst only as far as his periphery. When the analyst responded that it seemed to him that the patient avoided and excluded him, the patient explained: “I spin a web around you, then I sting you like a spider, and finally I digest you. That might give me a feeling of triumph— however, with a stale taste. I circle around myself—that's horrible, it goes on and on until you will say: let's give up and terminate. Then all I wanted in my good moments will be buried.”
The analyst could then show the patient that to spin his analyst into his web and to digest and dissolve him resulted in his feelings of loneliness; thus, the patient would not be dependent on him, and there would be nobody who could abandon him or who would not be availabl