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Beginning with Freud’s intermittent notes on the timelessness of the unconscious, the rhetoric among psychoanalysts on the subject of time has favored abstract general concepts over the specifically clinical experience of time—this, despite the fact that the latter, one could argue, is at the heart of our work. Under the clinical experience of time, we might include such items as the patient’s experience of time, the analyst’s experience of time, the nature of analytic time itself, and the clinical experience of what Freud called timelessness.
Time does appear as a factor in our literature on technique. Traditionally, analysts focused on the history of the patient and the reconstruction of the past. More recently, we have been enjoined to ignore all that and to consider only the present moment (Bion, 1967). And sometimes we are prompted to allow an image of the patient’s future (Loewald, 1956). These directives provide complex dilemmas for the analyst’s experience of time, inviting and sometimes demanding a specific temporal focus that runs counter to what we might think of as a free-floating experience of time.
If the latter might be considered a version of timelessness, akin to the experience of evenly hovering attention, this is not universally how the term timeless is used. Sometimes it refers, as here, to a release from the demands of time, sometimes to time’s unchanging tyranny, and sometimes to a landscape over which time has no dominion whatsoever. You will find these and other meanings in the articles that follow, as we ask eight authors, each with his or her own point of view, to consider the clinical experience of time.
Drawing on sharply conceived clinical vignettes, Donald Moss begins our issue with the implications of the shift in infancy from primary to secondary process functioning and from immediacy to delay. For Moss, timelessness refers to the primary process state in which “wish is satisfied immediately” (p. 352) before the “bitter experience” (p. 3