ABSTRACT
This essay was published as Spielrein was leaving Geneva for Russia, and it reflects the fruitful period of research at the Rousseau Institute alongside Piaget. Spielrein offers fascinating reflections on the idea of time both as experienced in dreams and through a multilingual analysis of the development of human language, where the future tense is derivative and subordinate to past and present, paralleling psychoanalytic insights about the primacy of the past. The structure of both language and dreams discloses the unconscious substrate of the mind where the past reigns, and subconscious thought distills everything past, and everything desired, into an eternal present.
