ABSTRACT
Milton Miller’s paper appeared in 1964 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, one of the world’s oldest and most respected psychiatric journals. It is a poetic clinical exploration of the absence of temporal continuity in the inner life of the psychopath. He implicitly suggests that an absence of attachment may impair the capacity to choose some potentialities, while surrendering others, and therefore may fail to deepen one’s relationship to objects; instead, the psychopath “seems to be walking through snow without leaving footprints.” One aspect of this failure to surrender potentialities that Miller does not comment on is its usefulness in maintaining fantasies of immortality, a temporal aspect of the psychopath’s grandiosity. If he loses nothing, he grieves nothing, and nothing ends.
