ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the progress of the sense of time in analysis. M. Baranger distinguishes between a "genetic sense of time" and a "technical sense of time". The analytical process in some measure rewrites the subject's history and at the same time changes its meaning. When the analytic process starts, it develops a temporal course substantially different from the everyday rhythm of life. Its temporal qualities are such that it comes to constitute a sort of deviation from everyday time: it carries the patient on a trajectory with its own space-time coordinates. D. Meltzer certainly made a more complete attempt to describe a linear, natural psychoanalytic process in recognizable and foreseeable steps that would be applicable to every case. Human time—based on an irreversible progression towards death and occupying a position somewhere between the irrecoverable past and the unknowable future—cannot fail to break up the cyclic pattern.
