The Concern with Time in Freud's Work

The concern with time permeates Freud's work, from Studies on Hysteria to Analysis Terminable and Interminable, which point out to a network of concepts that indicate Freud's complex theories on temporality. Indeed no other psychoanalytic thinker has put forward such revolutionary vision on the dimensions of time in human existence.

This volume brings together some of the most important papers written on the topic by members of the British Psychoanalytical Society. In the richness of the detailed clinical discussions the ways in which patients deal with time and memory are viewed as crucial indications about their internal world and ways of relating to their objects.

Disorientation regarding time tends to reflect levels of disruption to internal object relationships, inability to mourn or to experience guilt. Examples from literature and history are considered in order to examine the power of the repetition compulsion - Nachtreglichkeit - as well as how the impossibility of bearing the mental pain can lead to the creation of a timeless world.