ABSTRACT
The chapter highlights the paradox in Sigmund Freud’s accounts of the subject’s historicity. It argues that his notion of the subject’s history is limited by his theorizing of developmental stages as universal and based on biologistic explanations. In Freud’s conception of the “timelessness” of the unconscious we are confronted once again with limitations which derive from his reliance on biology. The emergence of a fresh perspective within the psychoanalytic relationship which is accepted by the patient is attributed by Freud to its timing. He implies that the timing of an interpretation involves ascertaining that the patient is free of resistance at that moment and ready to absorb a piece of truth, an accurate construction of a past event. The limitation of “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” concerns Freud’s emphasis on the importance of past time in the psychoanalytic method to the exclusion of the dimension of the future.
