ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the impact of time experience on the psychoanalysis of children and adolescents. It focuses on two convergent lines of investigation: the construction of temporality during development and some possible impacts of the identifications with the current adult world. The gradual elaboration of the separation anxiety allows for a slow construction of the child’s subjectivity, which includes temporality. The child’s own abilities articulated to the mother’s reverie build up their own continent in the child’s mind in order to shelter objects which present more integrated characteristics. In psychoanalysis, the time experience increasingly assumes the condition of the real. During psychoanalysis, children often act out the denial of reality and limit. The internal world that reveals itself in the space–time of each part of the session, in the whole session, or in each longer temporal unit of the psychoanalysis, is a world of transferred fantasies and imaginations. Parents are directly inside psychoanalysis.