ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic relationship takes place in time, and during an agreed time, with its intimate link with space and therefore with place. This link with time has to be acknowledged in the present of the analytic session, during which the need for togetherness and the inevitability of separations ebb and flow. Psychological time helps the patients to structure their experiences, both in external reality and intrapsychically, so that unknown or chaotic perceptions may become patterned and understandable. It also helps their analysts to be sensitive to what their patients are beginning to re-live through what is unconsciously being repeated in Freud’s discovery of “the transference”. Through this concept they have access to experiences of “distance from” and “nearness to” an object, which puts at their disposal a mechanism for the regulation of the intensity of experience and their suffering from their “neurosis or illness” and their defences against it.
