The Time of Re-living. For an Eventful Psychoanalysis.

Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 2020

Freud’s works are cumulative of notions about the concept of temporality but he never did systematic research on this subject. However, Freud dealt less with a fact which he later confessed to, the discontinuous perception of the functioning of the system perceptual– connections (Pcpt-Cs): its connection and relation to the formation of the concept of time within the subject. In this paper, I’m trying to take a look at the notion of time from an object relation perspective. I, on the basis of Winnicott’s concept of transitional objects and phenomena, have postulated two new concepts of transitional time objects and phenomena. I have suggested a new conceptual framework for understanding some complicated analytic issues such as transference and counter-transference, splitting, and some technical subjects as such silence in the analysis room. For this, I have brought some clinical vignettes in which one can find how the transitional time objects or phenomena work for both patient and analyst.

With a psychoanalytic session as a starting point, we discuss psychoanalysis’ temporal dimension, the analysis of a dream and the associative work of analyst and patient. We also discuss the importance of this temporal dimension for the co-constructed experience of the analytic third.

Wissen - Vermittlung - Moderne, 2015

Psychoanalysis in its essence is, notwithstanding the undercurrent of the founding father's totemistic dominance, the development of joint theoretical efforts. Whereas to a German speaking audience names like C. G. Jung, Wilhelm Fließ and Otto Rank most certainly sound a lot more familiar than the Hungarian Sándor Ferenczi's, the latter, after Freud had successfully alienated most of his companions one way or the other, remained a loyal student and faithful correspondent up until his death in 1933. And the father of psychoanalysis took advantage of Ferenczi's dedication with making it evident that while he committed himself to theoretical questions and to produce another wave of speculations on metapsychological issues, Ferenczi was advised to attend to the problems posed by therapeutic praxis, and to devote himself to practical matters at hand. 2 Freud's appreciation of Ferenczi for his technical writings, however, did not mean that Ferenczi himself would have refrained from wildly innovative associations, sometimes going to extremes with his interpretations, as in the case of telepathy or bioanalysis, 3 both of which are to be discussed in the second and third parts of this paper, respectively. Yet his ongoing interest in therapeutic methods approached from a practical perspective granted psychoanalysis numerous epistemological gains, ranging from the idea of introjection-which Freud rather skeptically commented upon, predicting meager effectiveness and short lifespan for the concept 4-through the theory of the "amphimixis," intermingling ontogenetic and phylogenetic viewpoints in in-1 This paper is part of the MTA-ELTE Association of General Studies of Literature Research Group's project Culture-Producing Media, Practices and Techniques (TKI01241). 2 1021F, 1115F.

This is the Time, This is the Record of the Time., 2016

This paper examines the way the subject and time sometimes fall out of alignment with each other. First, it looks at the question from a psychoanalytic perspective, drawing on both Freud and Lacan. Then, it considers two works of art, one in sound and one in visual art, that also deal with the topic. The first is a work by Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” from the album Big Science (Warner Bros. 1982), from which the lines “This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time” are drawn. The second is a work by Walid Sadek, What Job’s Wife Said (2014).

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2019

Every moment occasions a constitution of subjectivity that has at its heart a temporal structure. Far from being objective, time is dimensional. The extases (past-present-future) of time do not simply move forward but turn back upon themselves and weave forward and back at the same time. There is a reversibility to time. Past significations are transformed as expressed and lived in the present (après-coup) while future significations are transformed as anticipated in light of a present transformed by the now deepened experience past (avant-coup). This temporal reversibility happens at every moment, and is characterized by folds in time, fluid exchanges where in the lattice-work of remembering and anticipating, eclipsed forgotten moments suddenly emerge in the lightning flash context of phantasy, changing the nature of what's anticipated which changes the past, all shot through with feeling. In dialogue with Schoen's "Psychoanalysis in Real Time" (this issue), I suggest that this dimensionality can flatten in a way characterized by Schoen as a split between objective or real temporality and an experience of time that is subjective. I emphasize a field perspective of the intersubjective third as providing a frame for Schoen's considerations in her compelling reflection on time.

A psychoanalytic awareness of time in COVID may take us back to a child’s urgent questions made from having to wait without knowing why. That is the situation we are in as we ask, When will this be over? How long will this take? Are we there yet? From the vantage of psychoanalytic time, temporality as a psychical function and force is both organizing and disorganizing. But the feel, experience, and narratives of psychical reality are difficult to grasp. Our narratives are framed by the subjunctive mood, an estranging imaginary of attitudes, wishes, desires, and anticipations for what almost should have happened: ‘if only….’ ‘Or if I were …’ There are wishes for lost hopes to return once again. And like a dream, there are images of waiting, feeling rushed, running out of time, being too late, or losing one’s place.

The article gives an account of various disturbed experiences of time from a phenomenological perspective. The author distinguishes three levels for addressing variations of temporal experience—the temporal structure of consciousness itself, the actual experience of time, and the sociopolitical temporality. He excludes the psychological type of argument, exemplified by Philip Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory and concentrates on disorders in which the temporal structure of consciousness is itself altered. The clinical examples of disturbed temporalities being investigated come from studies of two influential, 20th-century German phenomenological psychiatrists: Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966) and Viktor Emil von Gebsattel (1883–1974) and include mania, phobia, schizophrenia, depression, and addiction. Philosophical examples come from Hannah Arendt’s “The Life of the Mind.” It is argued that not all disturbed experiences of time related to mental disorders are pathological, but that we can distinguish such experiences from their less severe varieties by appealing to the value-free norm of primordial temporality. A psychotic experience of internal time of the self coming to a standstill exemplifies such a pathological situation, in which temporal experience is not only altered, but ruined.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017

The aim of this article is to think of the place of the witness as a third place that the analyst, in the clinical space of trauma, is able to sustain. According to Ferenczi, in traumatic dreams a third is already being summoned. It is not the witness of the realm of law, nor the place of the father or the symbolic law. This is a third space that can be called potential, interstitial space, indeterminate and formless, where something that at first would be incommunicable circulates and gradually takes shape. This space allows and supports the literalness of a testimonial narrative, its hesitations, paradoxes and silences. More than a trauma theory, the notion of a potential space would be the great contribution of psychoanalysis to the treatment of trauma survivors, establishing the difference between the task of a psychoanalyst and the one of a truth commission.