Introduction

This book is about psychoanalysis and how we live time. Therapy is all about how we live time-how we live the time of our life and our bodies. The unconscious has always had a dual function in the history of psychoanalysis. It has been seen as both science and poetry, as a store-house of representation and as a body of affect. Enlightenment ideology positions the unconscious as a repository of knowledge and recollected meaning-desires which have once been conscious and are now repressed. But psychoanalysis has since Freud held onto the unconscious as another kind of memory, a memory that cannot be stored, or recollected, because it has never been known-this unconscious as an affectual psychic body unravels the master plot of Oedipus, revealing its defensive self-mastery.