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Sir Ralph Richardson once expounded on the magic of theatre which can make, at a critical moment, time stop still for both the audience and the players. However, after that still moment has passed, the rest of the play is a race against time in order to catch up what has been lost and finish on time.
According to :
“The processes of the system Ucs. (unconscious) are timeless, i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all”.
Hartocollis, former director of the Menninger Hospital and now Professor of Psychiatry in Patras, Greece, has compiled an array of variations on a theme of time. Chapters range from philosophic discourses on the nature of time, the early development of time in object relations theory, and time linked to the affects. References are very broad, from early psychoanalytic writers to those in the late 1970s, and these are also placed in the general scientific Zeitgeist.
Psychotic and borderline conditions are characterised by Hartocollis as, “boredom and a sense of depersonalization, the one or the other or both, affects dominated by the sense of time — time as present.” From chapters on time and psychopathology, he ranges widely on drug experiences, the brain, mysticism, death and the life cycle. He also writes cogently on time and the Dream.
This is an impressive text, in fact full of a diversity of apposite quotations. It is a book to dip into, to provide a springboard for thinking. And yet at the end one is left with an irreducible feeling that one has been denied being in touch with time — a necessary condition of its inherent unconsciousness.