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Time has been revived in psychoanalysis, especially in relation to infant research. This paper builds on ideas of time and rhythm from psychoanalysis by integrating Bergson's notions of duration and affect and queer theories' ideas of cultural spaces. Together, these theories create a vision of development as an ongoing process of affect regulation based in the emerging capacities to gather time. Here bodies come into being as they are produced in social spaces even as these bodies then reshape those social spaces. Thus, this theory integrates the cultural. These ideas will be demonstrated through a close reading of a case study of 18 years of one woman's diaries. These diaries tell a story of a childhood shaped by invasive and abusive parents followed by an adult life marked by intimate partner violence and bulimia. Focusing on three specific entries like one would examine moments in a session, this paper will track how the diarist demonstrates an emerging capacity to recognize, regulate, and experience affect as she is able to gather and rearrange time in her diaries.
The one who succeeds at speaking the truth of his or her history is the subject who abandons chronology's stifling order to inhabit the temporality of becoming, the intertwining of past and future, which the future anterior manifests (Torlasco, 2005, p. 141).
This paper is about time: how we create it, engage with it, how creating, gathering, and accumulating it enables us to experience and thus, regulate affect. Time and space seem to be abstract concepts but they are the foundation of the relational self. As temporality coemerges with affect recognition and regulation, it necessarily also underlies our capacities for differentiation, symbolic thinking, and embodied knowledge. These are all foundations of a sense of self. Time underlies self-systems as diverse as metabolism (e.g., fast or slow) to our thresholds of frustration, how long we can sustain or tolerate discomfort. And, as will be described