ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan examined the length of sessions and opposed the International Psychoanalytical Association standard fifty-minute period in an attempt to make time correspond to the function of speech in the field of language. The analyst brings out the unconscious by punctuating the analysand's speech. Through punctuation, regular speech acts manifest the unconscious. The logic of the unconscious and ethics rather than bureaucratic planning determine the length of psychoanalytical sessions. He includes the unconscious time dimension in the linguistic sign coupled to the apres-coup or retroaction structure by representing it with intercommunicating vectors: the chain of meaning crosses the chain of signifiers. He introduces time into Saussure's algorithm for the graph matrix: a time swerve that represents the Lacanian concept of the subject in which the notion of time is embedded. The time issue gives psychoanalysis its rigor as a conjectural science and reveals a perspective capable of accurately portraying the complexity of human psychic life.
