Time, Space and Phantasy

Rosine Jozef Perelberg, London, Routledge, 2008, 221 pp., £21.99

I read Time, Space and Phantasy on two different levels: the first as an invitation to travel with Rosine Perelberg through her personal time and space, from Brazil to London, eventually Paris, from her first interest in anthropology to psychoanalysis via the London School of Economics, the Tavistock Clinic, Maudsley Hospital and the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. All these different spaces create a particularly complex and rich inner experience and put her in a privileged position to write a remarkable book. The wide range of her interests is conveyed by a glance at the author's references: 16 full pages ranging from Karl Abraham to C. Yorke, including English, French, American and South American psychoanalytical authors but also anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers.

The second level was a fruitful journey through metapsychological and clinical material thanks to her capacity to synthesize clearly numerous lines of thought and to enrich psychoanalytic contemporary reflection. In my opinion, despite the three nouns in the title, it is the notions of time and temporality that are the core of her book. Space and phantasy, none the less, unfold in time.

The first chapter gives us an overall view of Freud's multi-dimensional model of temporality from the developmental model to the structural one, from the timelessness of the unconscious to the constitution of the ego ‘whose different timings are inaugurated by repression’ (p. 26). To English readers, chapters 2 and 7 will probably appear as the most original as they reflect on the notion of ‘après coup’. Rosine Perelberg explains why she prefers to keep the term of après coup rather than deferred action which, in her opinion, does not fully account for the reversibility of psychic life as it unfolds in phantasies, dreams and symptoms. Après coup, as it appears in Freud's writings, is linked, of course, to the concept of the unconscious and to