Epilogue: The Clinical Experience of Time

Perhaps the complexity of writing about time is reflected in the unique approaches each of our eight authors brings to the subject. For an issue on a single topic, there is remarkably little redundancy from one article to another, either in demonstrable theory or clinical practice. This is the more surprising because the authors were not chosen primarily for their diversity, and the variation that results is not the all-too-predictable one, based on a selection of analysts from different schools, but rather one that bespeaks each analyst’s individual approach and so is a valuable reflection of the disparate ways analysts actually think and go about their work.

Donald Moss opens the issue and begins his article with an incisive explication of the baby’s experience of time at the beginning of life, struggling to capture, in fantasy, the satisfaction once provided by the Other, now frustrated by delay. Thus begins the child’s first encounter with what Freud (1900) called “the bitter experience of life” (p. 566) and the failures of secondary as opposed to primary process wish fulfillment. Along the way, Moss speaks for the complexity of time itself and the difficulty we have of living in the present, suffering as we do a kind of death with the “ongoing loss of every present moment” (p. 359). And, conversely, he speaks to our attempts to simplify time with a fetishistic focus on the here and now, as if it could be detached from the there and then. Ultimately, both parties in the analytic room must find their way into the three dimensions of time. These are themes that are elaborated by all of our authors in their own characteristic ways.

Thus, Alessandra Lemma, too, describes the experience of time at birth, but the birth she is describing is that of a transgendered patient whose trajectory in time was interrupted by hormones and surgery and so is disconnected from a past that she disavows. Her experience of time begins with a hormonal and surgical rebirth, and so she is l