Time as Process and Ground: Temporality Is Not Content

Abstract

This appreciative response to the commentaries clarifies the plastic quality of temporality, at the core of consciousness. Efforts to represent “it” will always remain elusive. This approach brings phenomenological philosophy to bear to broaden the usual psychoanalytic emphasis on content in the direction of core processes of consciousness that are not usually observed.

Notes

¹ Symington and Symington (1996) captured some of this when they offer this evocative phenomenological reading of one of Bion’s basic metapsychological assumptions: “The most surprising Freudian concept which undergoes reformulation is the notion of the polarity conscious–unconscious. One of the most cherished beliefs is that psychoanalysis rests upon the unconscious and its relationship to consciousness, and yet Bion believes that this idea interferes with analytic understanding. Bion believes that the polarity conscious–unconscious needs to be replaced with finite–infinite. The infinite has no form, no categories, no number. … There is another pitfall about using the term “unconscious.” It is visualized as if the unconscious is a thing, so that people use phrases such as “it was banished into the unconscious” as if the latter was a locality in the mind.” (p. 8).

² This is not the same as Fonagy and Target’s (1998) “mentalization,” which refers to a more elaborate form that includes an understanding that others have minds of one’s own and that one’s thoughts are different from “objective reality.” Rather, I am trying to convey something more basic—the sense of location of being someone, whose perceptions and body are belong to her—and vice versa. Winnicott (1954) took this up in his paper on “psychesoma,” when he asks “(quote).”

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Notes on contributors

Stephen Seligman

Stephen Seligman, D.M.H., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco; Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis & the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; Joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.