ABSTRACT
I want the reader to consider the above quote by Bergson as a model for psychoanalysis where the temporalities of conscious and unconscious are not distinct. They are not divided into spatially discrete topographic modalities, but intrinsically connected. Past and present leak into, and penetrate each other, in a continuous state of becoming and duration. However, Bergson warns, if one note is concentrated on more than another, then we abstract lived time and extend it into space, thereby positing a before and an after, a line of succession where the parts of our lived being are no longer connected. When this happens a qualitative change occurs in the musical phrase. We can liken this to the dilemma of the hysteric who can be described as living a defensive dissociation, split between virtual and actual worlds, either retreating into a past state of fantasy, or alternatively being far too full of consciousness. Consequently, the hysteric lives an intellectual vitality that is cut off from affectual sensation, and at the same time she literally experiences the body as physiological symptoms which cannot be connected to her mental fantasy life. The hysteric, as I have described elsewhere, performs the body, but remains psychically disembodied (Campbell 2005). She remains fixed and unable to enter into lived time. For Bergson, lived duration is the flow of images and perceptions that are in a state of becoming between virtual and actual.
