Temporality—Variations on a Theme of Hans Loewald: An Introduction to a Relational Panel

Abstract

This paper introduces a panel on temporality in the work of Hans Loewald, presented at an IARPP conference in 2022. The presenters highlight Loewald’s idea that the experience of time shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. Each author applies Loewald’s notion of temporality to clinical material: Cheryl Goldstein uses the image of a “rift” in our relationship to time in her treatment of a young woman unable to bear the guilt of separating from a depressive mother. Shoulamit Milch Reich and Amir Atsmon present the case of a traumatized young boy unable to integrate, or link, the dimensions of past, present, and future, resulting in fragmentation and psychic collapse. Robin Young and Gila Ofer each explore gender development through a Loewaldian lens in which regressive wishes can safely emerge in treatment and ego development resume. Implicit in these presentations is the seminal influence of Loewald on clinical work and his integrative appeal across psychoanalytic orientations.

Keywords:

• differentiation
• Hans Loewald
• integration
• merger
• temporality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ These constructs are similar to Kohut’s “idealized parental imago” and “grandiose self” and the idealizing and merger transferences (Kohut, 1966).

² See also The Freud Lectures at Yale University. The chapter based on those lectures was “Transference and Love,” originally published in Loewald (1978b, p. 31), and re-published in Jonathan Lear’s (2000, p. 550).

³ Borges addressed a similar loss of meaning in his short story, “Funes, the Memorious” (Borges, 1962), in which a man, paralyzed in an accident, has only discrete eidetic perceptions of one moment after another but loses the capacity for abstract though.

⁴ I will follow the authors’ convention of referring to the therapist by her first name.

⁵ Danny’s use of his father to fold and arrange fragmented newspapers reminded me of observing, in the context of a custody evaluation, an interaction between a father and his 6-year-old son, who entered a tantrum state that would not be assuaged. After enduring his son’s inconsolable state for several minutes, the father silently took some folders out of his briefcase and told his son he had to “give the doctor some papers.” He began folding each one, methodically, making no demands of his son, who seemed transfixed by the metronome-like, predictable regularity of the sound and now able to regulate his affect in reciprocal relationship with his father, much as Danny’s father helped him achieve homeostasis.

⁶ It may be noted, however, that Loewald complained of the barriers to the acceptance of object relations theory, stating “there still seems to be a tendency to put up a ‘no admittance’ sign when metapsychological considerations point to object relations as … essential constitutive factors in psychic structure formation” (Loewald, 1970, p. 299).

⁷ In an anecdote reported by Rosemary Balsam (2008), Loewald once tripped over stairs at a conference. Not injured, Loewald quipped that he may have fallen “through the cracks of ego psychology and self psychology, or was it between hermeneutics and natural science? (p. 1121).”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seymour Moscovitz

Seymour Moscovitz, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He received his analytic training at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is on the teaching faculty at both institutes. Dr. Moscovitz is a co-founder of the Hans W. Loewald Center.