A Window in Time: A Response to “Disorders of Temporality and The Subjective Experience of Time: Unresponsive Objects and the Vacuity of the Future” by Stephen Seligman

Abstract

This response to Stephen Seligman’s “Disorders of Temporality and The Subjective Experience of Time: Unresponsive Objects and the Vacuity of the Future” considers Seligman’s ideas in the context of field theory. Seligman’s notion of becoming a self in time is elaborated through the concept, derived from field theory, of how time assumes an “essential ambiguity” that may facilitate analytic change and psychological development. This response suggests further that such “essential ambiguity” in relation to time opens both the patient and analyst up to a variety of complex, bidirectional influences, such as unconsciously mediated intergenerational transmissions of trauma. In addition, this response explores Seligman’s ideas associated with an analyst’s moment-to-moment recognitions and a patient’s corresponding development of a self in time in terms of their implications for analytic participation and analytic self-care.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty and is a supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. In 2009, she, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safron established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. With Lewis Aron she edits the Relational Book Series, which has published more than 60 volumes. She published Rocking the Ship of State: Women and Peace Politics in 1985 and Gender as Soft Assembly in 2005. She edited, with Muriel Dimen, Storms in her Head (on women and hysteria); with Lewis Aron, The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi; with Steven Botticelli, First Do No Harm: Psychoanalysis, Warmaking and Resistance, 2010; and in 2015 with Steven Kuchuck, The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor. She writes about gender and development, about analytic subjectivity, about ghosts, and about the analysts developing and writing around the period of the First World War.

Robert Bartlett

Robert Bartlett, Ph.D., is in private practice in Manhattan and works with children, adults, and couples.