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The notion of time in psychoanalysis intersects several other concepts such as repetition, regression, fixation, and rhythm, though Freud also discussed the idea of time directly. He began by emphasizing the atemporality of unconscious processes: The unconscious ignores time, and he suggested that the origin of the representation of time could be found in the discontinuous relation the preconscious-conscious system maintained with the external world, the time dimension then being associated with acts of consciousness. He related the representation of time to the representation of space, in that space could replace time in unconscious processes. Finally, pathology shows how temporal progression is ignored, a characteristic which is also seen in fantasy, where past, present, and future are united in one representation, and in the transference neurosis, which is based on the anachrony of affect.

The atemporality of unconscious processes is present in Freud's earliest writings. In Manuscript M (1950a [1892-99]), James Strachey refers to a sentence in which Freud points out that the chronological information ignored in fantasy is dependent on the conscious system. But it is in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) that the indestructibility of unconscious processes is proposed, along with its corollary—the impossibility of recognizing the passage of time that would bring about the end of something; its belonging to the past; and eventually its forgetting. In a note added in 1907 to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), concerning the indestructibility of memory traces, Freud wrote that "the unconscious is completely atemporal."

Freud continued to repeat the same ideas, devoting considerable space to it in his essay on the metapsychology of the unconscious. "The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system Cs." (1915e, p. 187). In the November 8, 1911, session of the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg and Federn, 1962-75), Stekel and Mein-hold were rapporteurs for the topic under discussion, "the supposed timelessness of the unconscious," (Vol. 3, pp. 299-310) and during the discussion there arose a number of difficulties concerning the definition of time. In his conclusion Freud pointed out five arguments in favor of the atemporality of unconscious processes: the incorrect temporal orientation of dreams; the fact that condensation is possible; the lack of effects of temporal transition; the attachment to objects; the characteristic tendency of neuroses to become fixed. He concludes: "If the philosophers maintain that the concepts of time and space are the necessary forms of our thinking, forethought tells us that the individual masters the world by means of two systems, one of which functions only in terms of time and the other only in terms of space" (p. 308).

While the processes of the unconscious are atemporal, Freud continued to remind us of the importance of the temporal factor as an element of reality. This is true of the process of maturation, which is the central element of the theory of libidinal states, but which also distinguishes normal from pathological mourning. (Time appears to be inevitable, to the extent that it seems endowed with intrinsic action while it is, in fact, the duration necessary to establish a process, work of some kind.) Conversely, time as experienced, the feeling of time, is shown to be relatively independent of the objective reality of the time shown on clocks and watches. We see this in the painful acceleration of duration constituted by the feeling of the ephemeral (1916a [1915]), but also, and in reverse, in the interminable extension of the boredom or impatience of the child who wants to "grow up," that is, who wants to abolish the time that separates him from the age of his parents. Passion and the illumination or rush of the drug addict reduce duration to a point, the instant when the alpha and the omega meet.

Freud believed that the temporal dimension is accessible to us only as a function of acts of consciousness. Because these acts are not continuous but, like the "mystic writing pad," depend on the innervation of the cathexes directed from the interior by rapid, periodic bursts into the preconscious-conscious system, this perception of time is also discontinuous. "I assumed," Freud wrote, "I further had a suspicion that this discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time" (1925a, p. 231). Although time is ignored by unconscious processes, this does not mean it can't be represented in unconscious formations, which translate it as they see fit. This corresponds to what could be called "psychic temporality."

After Freud other authors returned to the question of time in analysis and in psychopathology. Piera Aulagnier has shown the importance of anticipation in the relation between mother and child and in the process by which a subject identifies with it, a process that, as it turns out, the psychotic is unable to complete (1975), being condemned to repeat the same thing over and over again.

SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR

See also: Psychic temporality.