Delirium, or the Sway of Desire

In a lovely chapter of his book Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman explores our ail-too human experiences and constructs of time. “In this world,” Lightman writes, “there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.”1 It is the issue of time that I'd like to address. Of time and the times we inhabit, and about the peculiar relationship that psychoanalysts, in particular, have to time and history. A question arises immediately: mechanical time, or time of the body? In the writer's words: “For miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times.” I'm sure that Einstein, who in the fertility of his delirium played with the concept as ruthlessly as anyone, would say the same holds true for a psychoanalyst. “Each time is true, but the truths are not the same,” writes Lightman. Perhaps especially for a psychoanalyst. Another man, from another time and context but of equal stature to Einstein, put forth something of the same idea. His argument was that we ought not to serve two masters, indeed, that the very proposition is untenable. Which brings me to an incident that occurred several years ago, at the clinical facility of my psychoanalytic training institute.

I happened to walk in one afternoon on a group of trainees who were engaged, albeit in a kind of lazy and listeless way, in a conversation whose overtones escaped me. I'd remained on the fringes of the conversation until a second-year student approached and drew me into the friendly fray. Apparently, the young man had been polling his peers on the attractiveness and feasibility of various graduate degree options, when, with the respect due a slightly senior colleague, he asked me what I'd