ABSTRACT
Time silently pervades and influences not only the very essence of our everyday lives, but also the entire endeavor of psychoanalysis, both consciously and unconsciously. This chapter explores time from an assortment of vantage points, from quotidian concerns to the mysterious. Time silently blankets our inner and outer realities with both hard-nosed objectivity, and subjectively created perceptions and distortions. Historical classifications of time are presented dating back to the ancient Greeks and up to the atomic age. Internally, we can live in the present, past and future, simultaneously, in ways that both enhance our lives, goal and aspirations or destructively, allowing each tense (past, present and future) to interfere with our satisfactions in the present. This chapter examines ways psychoanalysts have classified different types of time and illuminates the development of our sense of time. It also sets the stage for subsequent chapters in which issues of time, considered from a relational perspective, are implicated in development, mental health, psychopathology and the psychoanalytic process.
