1st Edition

The Experience of Time Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Edited By Jorge Canestri, Leticia Glocer Fiorini Copyright 2009
    230 Pages
    by Routledge

    230 Pages
    by Routledge

    In contemporary psychoanalysis, the concepts of time and history have become increasingly complex. It is evident that this trend offers us an opportunity to think about the intercrossing of the different temporal dimensions imbuing the subject, an inevitable aspect of the analytic process. History is time past but what is recovered is now the working through of the subject history, which carries the mark of both passing time and re-signifying time. It is precisely the notion of history that gains different dimensions when a purely deterministic analysis is disassembled. Continuities and breaks are found between subjective time and chronological time; between the inevitable decrepitude of the biological body with the passing of time and the timelessness of the unconscious; between linear, circular times and retroactive re-signification; between facts, screen memories, memory and the work of constructing history; between the times of repetition and the times of difference; between reversible and irreversible time; between the timelessness of the unconscious and the temporalities of the ego.

    This book's hypothesis is that psychoanalysis revolutionizes the common conception of time, similar to the revolution in physics. While it does not ignore the 'psychological time arrow' no doubt distinguishing past, present and future, psychoanalysis reveals that in analytic experience, time acquires diverse formations in which these distinctions become more complex and fade until they take the shape of what Andre Green, in a felicitous expression, calls 'le temps eclate' ['exploded time'].

    Biography

    Jorge Canestri