Many psychoanalysts, including myself, have written extensively about the topic of time and psychoanalysis. In studying the literature on time, we encounter Freud’s statement that he cannot explain the paradox that while the unconscious is timeless, it is nevertheless modified by the undoing of repression.
Freud stated the unconscious is not affected by time. It is timeless, yet it interacts in some way with a world that knows change. For him, this puzzle had no apparent solution. In one of many references in Freud’s works to the timelessness of the id and the timelessness of the ‘unconscious’ system, he says “There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time; and no alteration in its mental processes is produced by the passage of time … Wishful impulses which have never passed beyond the id, … impressions too which have sunk into the id by repression, are … immortal … After the passage of decades, they behave as if they had just occurred… . Again and again I have had the impression that we have made too little theoretical use of this fact, established beyond any doubt, of the unalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach to the most profound discoveries … Unfortunately, I myself (have not) made any progress here.’” [New Introductory Lectures, Volume XXII] (John S. Kafka, 2016). Psychoanalysis: Unveiling the Past—Discovering the New. Selected Writings of John S. Kafka]
In one of his Wednesday evening seminars, “Freud comments on the newly oppositional ideas of Otto Rank, who cited relativity, quantum theory, and the principle of indeterminacy to cast doubt on psychic determinism. Freud, though granting Rank was a “highly gifted person,” notes “psychology has always suffered when the standpoints of other sciences are applied to it.” With “strong emotional emphasis,” Freud concludes with a plea to “leave psychology finally in peace; leave psychology to the psychologists.” [Quoted from Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 6 #3, June 2018, Book Review by Marcia Cavell of Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst by Richard F. Sterba, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982.]
The essential point of my argument is that from current scientific and philosophical perspectives, it is precisely quantum mechanics that offers the solution to Freud’s dilemma. Freud’s paradox that awaited new scientific and philosophical developments rests on the notion of the continuity of time. Timelessness (of the unconscious) means there is no continuity, yet change (the lifting of repression) depends on an interruption of the existing continuity.
In quantum mechanics, the continuity of time does not exist. The lack of continuity of time solves Freud’s paradox. Time is “granular,” “jumps” rather than moves in a continuous line.
The second characteristic of quantum mechanics is indeterminacy. It is not possible to predict where an electron will appear tomorrow. Between one appearance and another, it is not in a fixed position. It is in a “superposition” of positions. It “fluctuates.” The distinction between past, present, and future becomes indeterminate.
In quantum mechanics fluctuation does not mean it is never determined. Indeterminacy is resolved when a quantity interacts with something else.
For example, it collides with a screen, is captured by a particle detector, or collides with a photon—thus acquiring a concrete position.” [Carlo Rovelli. The Order of Time (translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell). New York:
Riverhead Books, 2018.] But this materialization is concrete only in relation to the other physical object with which it is interacting. Rovelli says, “With regard to all the others, the effect of the interaction is only to spread the contagion of indeterminacy.”
In addition to solving Freud’s essential paradox regarding time, quantum mechanics offers a resonance, an analogy, between its theory and psychoanalytic thinking about consciousness and the unconscious. There is a resonance on the one hand between contagion of indeterminacy and the free floating process uncovering what was unconscious and, on the other hand, between the “concrete materialization” at the moment, the instant of awareness, of the discovery in psychoanalysis of something newly conscious.
Roger Penrose, a neuroscientist, was a pioneer in the line of thought that relates consciousness to quantum mechanics and thus solves the mind-body problem. He is the author of Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics: Life in Parallel Worlds—Miracles of Consciousness from Quantum Reality (World Scientific Publishing Co., Inc., 2010.). While there exists an extensive literature both supporting and criticizing Penrose, the relevance of quantum mechanics to psychological processes, especially to consciousness, is now a frequent topic of scientific inquiry.
For example, Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Laureate physicist, thinks quantum mechanics is “the modern version of the grand question ‘Mind or Matter?’ because quantum mechanics is simultaneously information and physics.” [Seth Lloyd. Programming The Universe. New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 2007, pp. i—acclaim for Seth Lloyd.]
Freud’s dilemma about time consciousness, and the unconscious, the concurrent lack and presence of the possibility of change, at its core involves the mind/body problem. Quantum by addressing this problem, is deeply relevant to Freud’s paradox.
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