You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book was conceived as part of the “Controversies in Psychoanalysis” series, under the aegis of the Publications Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The aim of this series is to bring together psychoanalysts from diverse geographical backgrounds, and especially from different theoretical perspectives, to present their ideas about a psychoanalytic topic, so that readers can compare the various perspectives and learn from them.
The Experience of Time is composed of ten chapters by analysts affiliated with psychoanalytic institutes and societies in Brazil, Argentina, Italy, France, Canada, the United States, and England. A brief mention of some of the chapter titles will give the reader a sense of this: the topics include “A Problem with Freud's Idea of the Timelessness of the Unconscious,” “Unconscious Memory from a Twin Perspective: Subjective Time and the Mental Sphere,” “The Impact of the Time Experience on the Psychoanalysis of Children and Adolescents,” “The First Narrative, or in Search of the Dead Father,” and “Hindu Concepts of Time”—to name but a few. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of the experience of time (some beautifully and usefully, others less so), and herein lies the problem with this book.
The chance to have a meaningful dialogue about differing analytic viewpoints regarding any particular topic increases greatly if we can clearly define what we wish to discuss and which aspect of that particular topic we want to hear different viewpoints about. Accordingly, it would have been very useful for readers of this book to hear what André Green or Charles Hanly or Michael Parsons or any of the other contributors might have to say about one particular aspect of the experience of time— the same aspect to be addressed by all the contributors.
Only then would the reader be in a position to usefully compare the different viewpoints and learn from them, since all the contributors would be addressing one and the same aspect