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“So, frantically longing to throw myself into her arms, it was not until this moment, more than a year after her funeral, because of that anachronism that so often hinders the calendar of facts to coincide with the calendar of feelings, that I came to realize that she had died.” (M. Proust, Sodom and Gomorra I, p. 220).
Anniversary reactions are well-known phenomena in clinical practice, and there are numerous psychoanalytic contributions to clarify and to understand their psychodynamics. Yet, what we lack even today is a comprehensive systematic review of the manifold basic conditions and of the basic psychodynamic constellations that lead to anniversary reactions. This would also have, theoretically, to clarify the contradiction that arises from the assumption of anniversary reactions as “responses to an unconscious sense of time” (Mintz, 1971), as to Freud's basic conceptualizations of the timelessness of the unconscious. The aim of this paper is to present such a systematic review and to overcome the theoretical problems inherent in the concept of an unconscious sense of time active in anniversary reactions.
Anniversary reactions can, clinically, become manifest in various forms. The anniversary event is not always an unconscious one. Very often one can see individuals being preoccupied by ideas, e.g., to have to die at the age a beloved parent has died, to have to run into a disruption of marital relations following exactly the time course of the parental marriage, etc.