Refracted Time: André Green on Freud’s Temporal Theory

ABSTRACT

According to Green, psychoanalysts have lost the fundamental complexity of Freudian temporality and act as if time proceeded linearly from past to present to future. The debate over here-and-now transference interpretations, as opposed to reconstruction, disguises just such a reductive linearity. Two types of time existed for Green. The first takes fact into account; the second makes use of the regression afforded by sleep to ignore the passage of time. Freud was not talking about a regression to a reconstituted past, which would bring one back to linearity, but a regression to outdated means of expression and to images that represent wishes, as opposed to words that convey those wishes.

Notes

¹ Where there is an English translation available for Green’s work, I quote from it and reference it in brackets, complete with page numbers, after first citing the original French publication. Where no English translation is available, I cite the original French publication and translate any quotations from the original French.

² Shattered time is one possible translation of Le Temps Eclaté, the French title of Green’s Time in Psychoanalysis from which the previous quotations are taken. The French title is sometimes also translated as Exploded Time or Fragmented Time.

³ Après coup in French, and translated by Strachey, somewhat inaccurately, as deferred action.

⁴ By filed, Green undoubtedly had in mind the passage in one of Freud’s letters to Fliess: ”Our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subject from time to time to a rearrangement…to a retranscription” (Freud, 1896, p. 208).

⁵ According to Wikipedia, heterochrony is defined as a developmental change in the timing of events, leading to changes in size and shape. There are two main components, namely the onset and offset of a particular process and the rate at which the process operates. A developmental process in one species can only be described as heterochronic in relation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gail S. Reed

Gail S. Reed, Ph.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society and Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute and an honorary member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.