ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the most primitive subjective sense of time which, proposed to call 'reverberation time' develops out of the first relationship to the maternal object and shares its roots with the development of an 'apparatus for dreaming dreams'. It suggests that psychically it is the building block for the depressive position and the acceptance of the Oedipal situation. Hence, at the core of all deep disturbances people find an inability to negotiate the passage of time, leading to a psychic 'freezing' of time such as people find, for instance, in melancholia, in the 'psychic retreats' of borderline states or in the 'telescoping of generations'. The dream always has a dreamer. The dream is inserted into the temporality of the analysis with its own strange ways of moving, like the DeLorean car, back and forth in time, one does not always know why or how.
