Time Waits for No One: Discussion of “Psychoanalysis in Real Time: Temporal Troubles in the Clinical Dyad”

Sarah Schoen demonstrates how one’s capacity to experience a moment in the context of a lifetime is linked to subjective and objective self-awareness, developmental capacities elaborated upon by Bach. These capacities are developed through object relationships. Schoen beautifully describes the struggle, for both analyst and patient, to keep in mind present, past, and future time, to help a patient experience the timelessness of psychoanalysis as well as the relentless passage of life-time. I discuss how Loewald presents a similar way of thinking about how this, and other, developmental capacities are formed through object relationships. I then discuss one way of understanding this therapeutic object relationship: that the patient internalizes an analyst who is simultaneously immersed in virtual and actual time. I suggest that, perhaps, thoughts of termination reflect the emerging experience of “actual reality” into timeless transference psychoanalytic “reality”, signaling a developmental achievement and also helping the patient separately. In this way, termination serves the Loewaldian role of the father helping the child move out of a subjectively merged relationship with their mother.