Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality

Time Out of Mind

Neil J. Skolnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000103892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Includes a foreword by Nancy McWilliams

In Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality, Neil J. Skolnick takes us on a journey thattraces his personal evolution from a graduate student through to his career as a relational psychoanalyst. Skolnick uniquely shares his publications and presentations that span his professional career, weaving in issues around temporality and relational psychoanalysis.

Accessible and deeply thought-provoking, this book explores the many ways our lives are pervaded and shaped by time, and how it infuses the problems that psychoanalysts work with in the consulting room. Skolnick begins each chapter with an introduction, contextualizing the papers in his own evolution as a relational analyst as well as in the broader evolution of the relational conceit in the psychoanalytic field. Following an incisive description of the realities and mysteries of time, he highlights how psychoanalysts have applied severaltemporal phenomena to the psychoanalytic process. The papers and presentations address an assortment of time-worn psychoanalytic issues as they have become redefined, reconfigured and re-contextualized by the application of a relational psychoanalytic perspective. It purports to chart the changes in the field and the author's practice as, like many psychoanalysts, Skolnick explains his shifted perspective from classical to ego psychological, to relational psychoanalysis across the trajectory of his career. Finally, the author struggles to understand the contributions of time to the process of change in psychoanalytic thought and practice. This book also provides a fascinating guide to how our lives are contextualized in the invisibilities of time, illuminating the most frequent ways time influences psychoanalytic thinking and practice.

Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality will be of immense interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and therapists of all persuasions in their practice and training. It should also be of interest to philosophers, historians and scholars of psychoanalysis who have a general interest in studying the role of psychoanalysis in influencing contemporary trends of Western thought.

Chapter 1

Time out of mind¹

2017

Neil J. Skolnick

Time . . . thou ceaseless lacky to eternity.

William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

We’ve got nothing but time.

Susan Baskin, writer

Held up by some to be the fourth dimension, time remains one of existential reality’s most intriguing and elusive concepts. It is tasteless, colorless and lacks a corporeal form, yet it pervades the very fabric of our lives. It contextualizes our life narrative, moment-to-moment, year-to-year and generation-to-generation. Eva Hoffman (2009), in a neat little essay exclaims, “It is one of the fascinations of time that it is both the most intangible of entities and the most inexorable” (p. 14) and she boldly goes on to declare that:

In a sense time has been reality’s last unconquered frontier . . . The time revolution is taking place not in the interplanetary sphere but within our daily lives, perceptions, even bodies, and with enormous repercussions for social relations, forms of experience and, indeed, for our very understanding of what it means to be human.

(p. 15)

We can never actually see time, we must infer it from movement – the hands moving on a clock or the sun moving across the sky, or the changing height of a child as he or she moves through time. Aristotle (in Physics, 1941) argues that time and change or movements are inextricably intertwined. Meissner (2007) understands Aristotle as maintaining that we experience time and elapse of time only when we perceive some movement from before to after – that is movement experienced externally via sense experience (again hands moving on a clock) or internally introspectively (experiencing oneself aging). Theoretical physicists, charting the universe from the smallest atomic particle to the unimaginable expanse of large spaces and forces, are mystified by time and are ubiquitous in their not being able to explain it particularly well because, unlike every other process in the physical world, time, as we know it, cannot be reversed. It relentlessly travels on a one-way ticket, which physicists refer to as the “arrow of time.” Interestingly, Stephen Hawking (1988) actually postulates three arrows of time (thermodynamic, psychological and cosmological).²

Time’s nature has also baffled poets, philosophers and physicists, and the quotidian experience of train conductors, chefs and anyone rushing to a meeting since, well, time immemorial. Witness the facile ways we speak of time, without ever fully comprehending what time is all about: We can be ahead of time or behind time; we can live in the best of times and the worst of times. While we tend to divide time into past, present and future, many students of time note that the present moment of time is impossible to experience because by the time we do, it has passed. Einstein’s relative model of time boldly considers past, present and future to be illusions. We can make time, kill time, save time, waste time, and I could go on but I would use up all your time. Implicit in the way we structure our professional practice, time is money and existentially, in no time, we are out of time.

“Time is of the essence in psychoanalysis,” wrote the psychoanalyst William Meissner (2007). In this chapter I will attempt to demonstrate how time silently pervades and influences not only the very essence of everyday life, but also the entire endeavor of psychoanalysis, both consciously and unconsciously. Far from exhaustive, I hope to demonstrate its pervasive presence and influence on the multiple fabrics and meanings of our lives, not only in our work as psychoanalysts, but also in our everyday existence. Broadly speaking objective time can be linear, propelling us directly through past, present and future, but subjectively determined time can be balletic as it twists and turns and dances and pirouettes through inner worlds with the facility and mystery of an Olympic figure skater. Our perceptions travel back and forth through time resulting in dizzying experiences whereby the past influences present perceptions and present events can have marked effects on our memories of the past. And if that were not confusing enough, future expectations can influence both present experiences and past memories. Circumstances such as anniversaries or traumas can stop time or speed it up. I will attempt to describe several issues in which time overlaps with psychoanalytic explorations, including how we develop a sense of time, the effects of psychopathology on our perceptions of time, and interventions I have found useful with patients whose rigid, distorted subjective experience of time can be deleterious to their functioning.

In my brief exploration of the literature on the nature of time, I was directed through realms of philosophy, art, music, Einsteinian and Newtonian physics, aging, development, and most pertinent to this presentation, the psychoanalytic process. Andre Green (2009) notes that Freud, “never brought together his diverse conceptions of time into a single presentation. Thus, he left us with a mosaic of temporal mechanisms without conceptual unification” (p. 1). By and large psychoanalytic writers have not ventured prodigiously into speculating about issues of time in our work or the experiences of our patients. This is changing. A contemporary psychoanalyst, Dana Birksted-Breen (2016), makes the claim that, “Issues concerning time are at the basis of psychoanalytic theory, of the analytic setting and of the clinical phenomena we encounter. They also underlie important technical and theoretical differences in psychoanalytical approaches, implicitly or explicitly” (p. 139). I believe she is signaling an increased interest being directed toward the issue of time by contemporary psychoanalysts.

Hans Loewald wrote extensively and creatively about time, though, as Seligman (2018) notes, his heuristic 1980 essay on time has been largely and unfortunately ignored. Loewald boldly conjectured that psychic structures, which typically assume a spatial metaphor, are better described as temporal in nature. He is not talking about objective tick-tock time, but refers rather to psychic time, what the ancient Greeks referred to as Kairos time, and the active relationship between the modes of time, past, present and future. For example, he speaks of the ego as a structure that organizes times past and brings them into the present:

The remarkable fact is that in mental life the past, that is psychic past, is not in the (objective) past but is active now as past, and that the psychic present acts on the psychic past. The psychic past and the psychic present are represented in psychic systems, agencies or structures, as Freud has variously called them, which are actual and active in the objective present of mental life.

(p. 45)

Likewise, Loewald defines the superego as organizing future time (e.g., the consequences of our actions) also bringing them into the present. He states:

The superego functions from the viewpoint of a future ego, from the standpoint of the ego’s future that is to be reached, is being reached, is being failed or abandoned by the ego. Parental authorities, as internalized in the agency of the superego, are related to the child as representatives of a future and of demands, hopes, and misgivings, or despair, which pertain to an envisioned future of the child.

(p. 46)

Ultimately, he “points to the importance of time as being the inner fiber of what we call psychical” (p. 52).

Mitchell (1992) was influenced by Loewald when he considered reformulating psychic structures as organized by temporal considerations rather than by spatial metaphors. He invokes Ogden’s consideration of Kleinian positions as being dialectical in nature in order to make an argument for considering our shifting experiences on a temporal plane (before, now and after) rather than a spatial plane (surface and deep). Ogden considered Klein’s positions as each defining and negating each other, rather than representing a primitive or advanced psychic organization. Likewise, Mitchell conjectures: “Again, it is a mistake to think of one form of experience as more basic or deeper, because they are not layered in space; rather they shift back an forth as forms of self-organization over time” (p. 18).

Most students of time have developed various ways of classifying types of time. Categorizing time might actually present us with an easier task than actually defining any singular essence of time. We might have to settle for that. Moreover, I can state with some degree of certainty that while there are many definitions and classifications of time, coming from a range of disciplines, there is a consensus that most theorists will concur that one dimension of time exists as a real, true, tick-tock linear phenomena. The ancient Greeks referred to this time as Chronos, distinguishing it from the previously mentioned Kairos. Corresponding to something akin to Bion’s concept of O, this is Newton’s absolute time. It is an immutable reality that exists separately from our perceptions of it and the meanings we give it. It travels inexorably in one direction that as far as our most current state of knowledge has it, cannot be reversed. In contrast to Newton’s model of absolute time, Einstein concocted a drastically different model of objective time, one referred to as relative time, which, by contrast, is not absolute or fixed. Like Chronos time, the perception and measurement of relative time is objective but the measurement of it depends on our distance from where it is recorded as well as our speed from the point in space where it is being measured (Isaacson, 2008). It is a malleable time, one that can be altered and re-contextualized, but nonetheless is still measurable by objective measures, and not subjective perceptions.

In psychoanalysis we also make distinctions between types of time. For example, Modell (1990) utilized the previously mentioned terms used by the ancient Greeks to distinguish between absolute and non-linear time, Chronos and Kairos, respectively. Stern expands the definition of Chronos, or objective time, as the “kind of time (that) lies outside the realm of human experience . . . it leads inexorably from birth to death; it is linear, irrevocable, and without human meaning” (Stern, 2012, p. 56). This is what I refer to as tick-tock time; it is the time that paradoxically cradles and contextualizes all of life while at the same time it stalks, torments and tyrannizes us with the eventual demise of life. By contrast, Kairos, as Modell (1990) uses it, corresponds to our subjective sense of time. While it might be tempting to equate Kairos time with Einstein’s relative time that would actually be a mistake. Einstein’s relative time, while malleable, is determined not by vicissitudes in human subjectivity, but rather by variations in its measurement. In contrast, Kairos is not measured objectively. It is non-linear, imbued with human meaning, and, to quote Stern (2012), “can turn back on itself in ways that allow meanings to change and grow” (p. 56). To put this another way, Chronos time includes both Newton’s objective time and Einstein’s relative time, both of which can be reliably measured, but not Kairos time, which is subjectively determined.

Freud ventured into the realm of Kairos time when he postulated the timelessness of the unconscious, and by extension, dreams. For him, primary process, the wellspring of human subjectivity and meaning, is not rooted in the one-way linearity of objective time. It has no starting or ending point of reference. It playfully moves forward and backward in time, wreaking havoc with objective reality and meaning-making as the past, present and future influence each other in decidedly non-linear fashion creating such phenomena as nachträglichkeit and après coup with the alluring impenetrability of a Salvador Dali painting. Kairos is the time of dream imagery that we can employ in attempting to understand where our patients live.

Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in dreaming, more broadly and metaphorically defined than Freud (Ogden, 2016; Parsons, 2009; Bion, 1962, and others). Parsons, a British psychoanalyst (2009), defines “living in time,” taken from a chapter in Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971), not as the area where our experience is lived, but rather, as the time and place in which we become truly alive. Moreover, he proffers, “I want to put forward the idea that to be fully and creatively alive means living at a point of intersection between time and timelessness” (p. 37). As with Ogden (2016), no longer is dreaming confined to sleeping states. Instead, another distinction is forged in our categorizing different types of time. Parsons again, “To describe a dream belongs to the temporality of daily life, but the experience of dreaming lies outside of this ordinary temporality” (p. 38). Primarily because of a dream’s direct connection to the unconscious, controls and defensiveness give way to unstructured timelessness, a form of time without the linearity, directionality, predictability and causality of tick-tock time. In the intersection of time and timelessness, the analyst is made privy to the engine room of the patient’s aliveness. Here it becomes not only important to decipher the meaning of a dream, but more importantly, it is a place and time to experience, with a patient, the expanded corners of their individual idioms, those creative places where they feel truly and wholly alive. I have always felt that when a patient dutifully attempts to interpret the meaning of a dream there is a shortchanging of another type of experience that can be located more from the patient’s associating to the experience of the dream. It is here where I encourage the patient to freely wander, an unstructured venturing into the intersection between time and timelessness. Here is where the patient may come truly alive.

From the contemporary psychoanalytic school of Field Theory, Baranger and Baranger (2008) have also focused on temporality in their work. As they put it:

The temporal aspect of the (analytic) field is nothing like the time experienced in everyday situations. The time of the analysis is simultaneously a present, a past, and a future. It is this temporal ambiguity, the mixture of present past and future, that permits patients not only to become aware of their history but also to modify it retroactively . . . take them on again with new meaning.

(p. 80)

An important contribution to the overlap of relationality, temporality and development has been made by the developmental psychoanalyst, Stephen Seligman, in a recently published book, Relationships in Development: Infancy, Intersubjectivity, and Attachment (2018). In a beautifully written chapter, “Coming to life in time,” he expounds upon the life-affirming responsiveness, often non-verbal and bodily, of the mother with her baby that contributes to a child’s expectations of a lively, efficacious future. He also discusses its opposite, the deadening, futile truncating of a forward moving temporality that can be engendered by a non-responsive mother. He refers to these problematic organizations of a sense of time (past, present and future) as “disorders of temporality.” He distinguishes two broad types of temporal disorders: “Disorders of Simultaneity” when the past and present become melded together and “Disorders of Subsequency” – a profound sense of futility felt as things will never change. “Disorders of Simultaneity” is in essence the stuff of trauma. During “Disorders of Subsequency,” the unprocessed past overshadows and truncates a fully alive experience of the present.

Nachträglichkeit,³ loosely translated as deferred action, and après coup or afterwardness (Birksted-Breen, 2003) are two expressions used to denote a similar process by which the meaning of a past event is obtained temporally after its occurrence by a retrospective analysis of the forces that were operating at the time of a memory’s occurrence. Fonagy (1992) notes that the actual memories that surface in an analysis are not as important as the procedural memory that organize and influence the surfaced memories. Stern (2012) extends this idea such that the meaning of a surfacing memory is to be found in the here and now co-construction of the memory by the intersubjective mélange of the interacting analyst and patient. This would be the non-linear balletic time I referred to earlier. Our perceptions travel back and forth through time, influencing our objective and subjective realities in powerful ways.

We have come to take as a given that historic events, especially trauma, can both stop time and influence our perceptions of the present and future time. Moreover, current events, again, particularly traumas, can influence and alter our perceptions and memories of past time.

Parsons (2014) privileges not only the past’s influence on the present but notes that the future also can have a marked effect on the present and, likewise, the present can have a marked effect on the future. He refers to this phenomenon as avant-coup and claims it is bi-directional. In one direction, what he refers to as the future counterpart of après coup, the future can be affected by the present. As he states, “future expe...