Time, Space and Phantasy

Rosine Jozef Perelberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415463218
• eBook ISBN: 9781317723585
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Time, Space, and Phantasy examines the connections between time, space, phantasy and sexuality in clinical practice. It explores the subtleties of the encounter between patient and analyst, addressing how aspects of the patient's unconscious past are actualised in the present, producing new meanings that can be re-translated to the past.

Perelberg's analysis of Freud's Multi-dimensional model of temporality suggests that he always viewed the constitution of the individual as non-linear. In Freud's formulations, the individual is decentred and ruled by different temporalities, most of which escape their consciousness. Perelberg identifies the similarities between this and Einstein's theory of relativity which states that rather than being absolute, time depends on the relative position and speed of the observing individual suggesting that rather than being a reality, time is an abstraction, connecting objects and events.

Throughout this text, Perelberg draws together connections between time, mental space, and phantasy showing how time is constantly reshaped in the light of new events and experiences. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers.

Part One
Theory and Clinical Practice

1
Time and space in psychoanalysis and anthropology

Two temporal axes permeate Freud’s work: the genetic, which articulates development with the biological dimension of the individual’s life, and the structural, present in Freud’s various models of the mind. They are associated with different spatial configurations: unconscious, preconscious and conscious in the topographical model of the mind (from 1900 until 1923), and the id, ego and superego in the structural model (from 1923 onwards).

Freud’s letter to Fliess of 6 December 1896 announces the mapping of the mind that he intended to develop in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams:

As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various kinds of indications . . . I do not know how many of these registrations there are – at least three, probably more.

(Masson, 1985: 207)

Whilst starting with an archaeological metaphor that underlined a linear conception of time, in this passage Freud indicates a progressive complexification of his model that will understand temporality along several axes (a central theme developed in Chapters 2 and 7 of this book). The Interpretation of Dreams establishes a link between space and time, as Freud refers to a topographical model, using a spatial metaphor in an attempt to map the mind. Freud suggests (1900b: 536) that ‘the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking life’. This statement includes the notion of two moments in time, between which there is a period of ‘latency’ and elaboration. This spatial disjunction parallels a temporal one, elaborated in the process of après coup.

Freud refers to the mind in terms of a ‘physical locality’, although he is careful not to link it to any anatomical location. Thoughts are ‘never localised in organic elements of the nervous system but, as one might say, between them’ (1900b: 611). Each space is ruled by a certain type of temporality, and here Freud further develops his distinction between primary and secondary processes, calling the rules that govern the unconscious ‘primary process’. Unconscious thoughts must undergo a process of transformation or distortion before they are accessible to consciousness. Primary process concerns the rules or grammar of that transformation. These rules disguise unacceptable or traumatic unconscious ideas, which can only be understood via a process of interpretation.

Primary process is ruled by displacement, condensation and conditions of representability. Displacement allows an apparently insignificant idea or object to be invested with great intensity that originally belonged elsewhere. Condensation is the means by which, according to Freud, thoughts that are mutually contradictory make no attempt to do away with each other, but persist side by side. They often combine to form condensations just as though there were no contradictions between them, or arrive at compromises that our conscious thoughts would never tolerate. Condensation is another way of disguising unacceptable thoughts pushing through into consciousness. Conditions of representability indicate why dreams represent words in figurative form, in images. Another rule of primary process is the absence of chronological time. Timelessness characterizes the unconscious mode of functioning. Different times co-exist, and this is what allows one to dream that one is a child, a baby or an older person all at the same time.

The association between dreams and earlier experiences, between the present and the past, is at the core of Freud’s thinking about dreams: ‘A dream might be described as a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being transferred onto a recent experience. The infantile scene is unable to bring about its own revival and has to be content with returning as a dream’ (1900b: 546).

Dreaming, Freud adds later, ‘is a piece of infantile life that has been superseded’ (1900b: 567). It is this characteristic that creates the sense of timelessness in dreams. The childhood wish, however, ‘is only represented in the dream’s manifest content by an allusion, and has to be arrived at by an interpretation of the dream’ (1900a: 199).

Other modes of functioning typical of the unconscious are an absence of negation (in the unconscious ‘No’ does not exist, and contradictory ideas persist side by side), and representability, whereby abstract ideas are replaced in dreams by pictorial expressions.

Freud contrasted the rules of primary process with secondary processes that exercise a regulatory function over the primary process, through the establishment of the ego (or the person’s self ).

Freud also introduced the progression and regression that occur in the movement between the different psychic ‘localities’. Progression moves from the unconscious to the preconscious–conscious; regression moves from the preconscious–conscious towards the unconscious, as happens in dreams.

Once the baby has an experience of satisfaction, such as the primary experience of feeding at the breast, a trace is laid down in the memory, which Freud designated the memory trace. When the baby is next hungry he will wish to repeat that same experience at the breast that satisfied his hunger. The object – the breast – is now sought, and provides the prototype for all further experiences, including that of love. The finding of the object is always a re-finding:

An essential component of this experience of satisfaction is a particular perception (that of nourishment, in our example), the mnemic image of which remains associated thenceforward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need. As a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a psychical impulse will at once emerge, which will seek to recathect the mnemic image of the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfilment of the wish . . . Thus the aim of this first psychical activity was to produce a ‘perceptual identity’ – a repetition of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need.

(Freud, 1900b: 565–566)

and:

No one who has seen the baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

(Freud, 1905: 182)

And later:

This satisfaction must have been previously experienced in order to have left behind a need for its repetition.

(Freud, 1905: 184)

This primitive experience takes place in the intimacy of the contact with the body of the mother. The ‘right’ amount of eroticism is crucial, so that it is not too much, overexciting the child, or too little, without an erotic investment by the baby or its relationship with his/ her own body. Inevitably, however, the mother oscillates between ‘excess of gratification and excess of frustration’ (Green, 1986b). This erotic dimension lies at the basis of what Laplanche (1997) has referred to as the seduction of the child by the adult, through the enigmatic message addressed, unilaterally, by the adult to the child, and which is to be found at the very heart of the ‘primal fantasies’ (see Chapter 2).

In The Two Principles of Mental Functioning, Freud (1911c) extended the distinction he had pointed out 15 years earlier between the ‘primary system’ and ‘secondary system’ of mental functioning and introduces the term ‘reality testing’.

In the primary system, such as operates in the young infant, in dreams and to a large extent in waking phantasies, the pleasure principle dominates the scene. The baby’s needs can, in the first instance, be satisfied in terms of hallucinatory wish fulfilment. It is its failure to procure adequate satisfaction, with subsequent frustration, that compels the further step of taking reality into account. One can see here the precursors of Winnicott’s ideas on disillusionment. Now it is no longer only what is pleasurable that counts; reality also has an important role. Freud (1911c) indicates that it is in the process of waiting that attention is developed, so as to be prepared for the new impressions. Motor discharge, instead of being inchoate as earlier, is organized in the direction of behaviour. This is carried out through a process of thought. The link is thus established between time (waiting), space and the beginnings of thought.

It is with the appearance of the reality principle that one species of thought activity was split off and kept free from reality testing: phantasy life, the continuation of play in children. There is a link between the wish, the intervention of the reality of waiting and phantasy life.

‘In the absence of a real object, the infant reproduces the experience of the original satisfaction in a hallucinated form’ (Laplanche, in Steiner, 2003: 13). Laplanche suggested that:

This is ‘a myth of origin’: by this figurative expression Freud claims to have recovered the very first up urgings of desire. It is an analytic ‘construction’, or fantasy, which tries to cover the moment of separation between before and after, whilst still containing both a mythical moment of disjunction between the pacification of need (Befriedgung) and the fulfilment of desire (Wunscherfullung), between the two stages represented by real experience and its hallucinatory revival. It is here that the notion of space, separation from the object, is instituted, and also the beginnings of phantasy life.

(Steiner, 2003: 13)

Winnicott’s work on the function and development of play was inspiring for the understanding of mental space, phantasy and dreaming and their function in mental life and development. Winnicott pointed out the mother’s facilitating function in enabling the child to have an illusion of omnipotence. Development takes place in the slow process of disillusionment that needs to be well modulated in the relationship with the mother. Winnicott (1971: 13) viewed potential space as ‘The intermediate area . . . that is allowed to the infant between . . . primary creativity and objective perception based on reality testing’. It is ‘unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external reality, [it] constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts, religion and imaginative living’ (1971: 16). ‘It is intermediate between the dream and the reality that is called cultural life’ (1971: 150). ‘In so far as the infant has not achieved transitional phenomena I think the acceptance of symbols is deficient, and the cultural life is poverty stricken’ (Winnicott et al., 1989: 57).

The infant should not wait too long, or too little. If he waits too much the negative of the object, its absence, will be over-emphasized in relation to its presence. What is also evoked is the multitude of registrations in this first experience of the mother: sounds, smells, textures and rhythms that constitute the baby’s environment. Anne Dennis refers to this as an ‘archaic temporality’ based on rythmic experiences, inseparable from auto eroticism. It lacks the characteristics of Pcs/Cs thought (linearity, structuring in terms of part, present and future, order, and abstract representation) (1995). Botella and Botella (2005), exploring the links between trauma, the negative and the difficulties in the emergence of the experience of intelligibility, have suggested the potential role of transformation that psychoanalysts can perform in a session through the work of figurability. This arises from a state of formal regression in the analyst, which allows access to a state of ‘memory without recollection’, when something emerges that has not been able to be represented (2005: XV). In their view, the absence of representable content does not mean an absence of an event (2005: 164).

Kristeva describes the tasting of Proust’s madeleine in the following way: ‘Soaked in tea, the morsel of cake touches the palate. This point of contact (the most infantile and archaic that a living being can have with an object or a person, since food, along with air, is that exquisite need that keeps us alive and curious about other people) . . .’ (1996: 17). Proust’s search for lost time is a never-ending search for the ‘lost, invisible temple of the sensory time of our subjective memories’ (1996: 171). Sensory time, so much of which is pre-verbal and archaic, is perhaps some of what will be found and given words in an analysis in terms of après coup.

In the metapsychological papers, Freud introduces the concept of primary phantasies (Urphantasien) that are there from the beginning, but can only be ‘reactivated’ so to speak in the life of each individual in terms of après coup (see Freud, 1915a–e, 1916–17, 1918; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973; Perron, 2001; Steiner, 2003; Perelberg, 2006). Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) view these primary phantasies, which are transmitted philogenetically, as structuring experience. Green suggests the notion of the disposition to re-acquisition (2002a). Primal phantasies are re-actualized through individual experience. These ideas will be further explored in Chapter 2.

Freud’s paper Mourning and Melancholia (1915d) introduces a major shift in his work away from a theory that predominantly accounted for the vicissitudes of the drives and their representations toward a theory concerned with the internal world and identifications. It is the absence of the object that opens the space for the beginnings of thinking and, one can suggest, of time. Freud had already discussed the role of incorporation whereby the individual would identify in the oral mode with the lost object; the constitution of the internal world was made through identifications. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920a), Freud interprets his grandson’s game with a cotton reel as the child’s attempt to master his mother’s absence. In The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (1924b), Freud states: ‘But it is evident that a precondition for the setting up of reality is that the objects have been lost which once brought real satisfaction’ (1924b: 183). In Negation (1925b), Freud puts forward the formulation that thinking begins ‘when the omnipotent control over the subjective object is shattered’. The absence of the object, whilst inaugurating space, is also connected with the beginnings of time. The simplest narrative contains the story of an object that left and then came back. Is the dimension of loss, enquires Laplanche, ‘co-extensive with temporalisation itself?’ (1999: 241). The centrality of the notion of absence and waiting in the structuring of the mind cannot be underestimated. In the analytic process this will find its echoes in the silence and the waiting of the analytic attitude.

These ideas are central to Bion’s thinking, and he indicates the way in which the maternal function of containing thoughts and feelings is internalized and enables the creation of mental space. Using a mathematical metaphor, he pointed out that the geometrical concept of space derives from an experience of ‘the place where something was’. If this concept is to be used to characterize mental phenomena, the concept of space in dreams designates the place where the lost object was, or the space where some form of emotion used to be (Bion, 1970: 10). It thus implies that an object’s place has been lost. This mental space as a thing in itself is unknowable, although it can be represented by thoughts. Bion links the existence of this space to the experience of a container that is receptive to projections and thus allows for the realization of mental space as well as the development of thought. According to Bion, thoughts lead to emotional development, and are to be contrasted with acting out, when the space left for thinking is felt to be intolerable and there is pressure for the apparent, immediate gratification that is felt to lie in action. As Hanna Segal (1980: 101) suggested, ‘. . . only what can be adequately mourned can be adequately symbolised’.

In a paper on Borges and mourning, Ogden (2000) suggests that successful mourning involves a demand for the individual to create ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Epigraph
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Theory and Clinical Practice
• Part Two Applications
• References
• Index