ABSTRACT

The following clinical vignette was not written by a therapist but by a physicist. It is from a book entitled Einstein’s Dreams (Lightman, 1993), which has to do with the many possible natures of time and the many possible natures of reality that depend on how we experience past, present, and future:

Every Tuesday, a middle-aged man brings stones from the quarry east of Berne to the masonry on Hodlerstrasse.… He wears a gray wool coat in all seasons, works in the quarry until after dark, has dinner with his wife and goes to bed, tends his garden on Sundays. And on Tuesday mornings, he loads his truck with stones and comes to town.… And as he passes people on the street, his eyes are on the ground. Some people know him, try to catch his eye or say hello. He mumbles and walks on. Even when he delivers his stones to Hodlerstrasse, he cannot look the mason in the eye. Instead, he looks aside, he talks to the wall in answer to the mason’s friendly chatter, he stands in a corner while his stones are weighed.

Forty years ago in school, one afternoon in March, he urinated in class. He could not hold it in. Afterwards, he tried to stay in his chair, but the other boys saw the puddle and made him walk around the room, round and round. They pointed at the wet spot on his pants and howled.… A clock with big red hands read 2:15. And the boys hooted at him, hooted at him as they chased him around the room, with the wet spot on his pants.…

That memory has become his life. When he wakes up in the morning, he is the boy who urinated in his pants. When he passes people on the street, he knows they see the wet spot on his pants. He glances at his pants and looks away. When his children visit, he stays in his room and talks to them through the door. He is the boy who could not hold it in [pp. 167–170].