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Experiences of identity, the passing of time and memory have close metapsychological links. Freud studied them in a number of texts, focusing in particular on the timelessness of the unconscious and the unsustainability of memory in consciousness, without explicitly situating them in the intermediate space, the preconscious. Short clinical vignettes show how temporal experience is organized very differently depending on the psychic organization involved: the frozen time of psychosis and the accelerated time of mania attest to a dysfunctional preconscious, while the long temporality of symbolization integrates the duration of absence and the temporal period of latency. A functional preconscious makes trajectories from the unconscious to the conscious possible in both directions, bringing porosity and flexibility to mental life as a whole. The world of phantasy, based on the experience of discontinuity, also develops here. But this discontinuity is only tolerable if a temporal binding mechanism links psychic events over time, just as discontinuous notes are grouped together in music. It is then that the passing of time, memory images and the sense of existence can, in one and the same psychic movement, lead to an experience of continuity.