The riddle of time and space

Abstract

Time is the most important feature or fundamental describer of normal human experience and is also the most eminent forgotten element of psychoanalysis. Freud believes that the unconscious is timeless and believes that it perceives any given moment as new and immaculate. He makes very little effort to illustrate the origin of time; however, he points to the function of the Pcpt-Cs as the key to this riddle. After him, fewer psychoanalysts can be found who have systemically researched this subject, except for André Green, Hartocolles, Arlow, and Sabbadini. In this paper, I have tried to illustrate how the sense of time is related to libidinal cathexis. I have displayed, through some pathological situations such as melancholy, mania, and schizophrenia, and a clinical vignette, that the more ego invests libido in the objects, the faster we sense the passage of time and the more it withdraws libido from the objects into itself, the slower time passes. Finally, using my previous viewpoint about transitional time objects and phenomena, I have presented some ideas about an object relation account of the origin of the sense of time.

Key words:

• time
• perception–consciousness system (Pcpt–Cs)
• transitional time objects
• transitional time phenomena

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali Pajoohandeh

Ali Pajoohandeh, PhD (Psychology), was born in 1978 in Mashhad, Iran, where he has founded a counseling center. He was introduced to psychoanalysis in 2000 as an MA student but started his professional education in it in 2010 with group studies in Mashhad and Tehran. At the same time, because of the immature state of psychoanalysis in Iran, he founded a group study for counselors and psychiatrists with the help of IPA members such as Dr. Roshanaei Moghadam (Iran), Dr. Alisobhani (USA), and Dr. Rahimi Danesh (Sweden), and some non-IPA members such as Dr. Kiani–Dorrf (Germany) and Dr. Makaremi (France), both remotely and face to face. He joined the Tehran Center for Psychoanalytic Studies (TCPS), founded by Dr. Roshanaei Moghadam in 2015, and became a psychoanalysis candidate like other members of his group in Mashhad. He is now a senior candidate in psychoanalysis at the TCPS and has published some articles and books on attachment theory, parenting styles, and the subjects of time and death in psychoanalysis.