ABSTRACT
Temporality has central importance in D. W. Winnicott's understanding of subjectivity. The most significant time of the subject’s life is, for him, the time of the mother/infant relationship. Winnicott refers explicitly to the importance of time being “kept going by the mother” in the continuity of her holding of the baby. Winnicott emphasizes that the baby’s ability to retain an ‘internal” imago or memory of the caretaker is what sustains him/her through time. Jacques Lacan’s notion of logical time underpins a number of his positions including his concept of desire, the times of the Oedipus complex and the structure of psychoanalytic practice itself. Lacan distinguishes what he designates “logical time” from chronological or clock time. Lacan argues that the instigation of clock time, originating with Huyghen’s 1659 invention of the isochronic clock, inaugurated the development of the exact sciences. His concept of logical time explicitly counters linear notions of time informing some psychoanalytic notions of “developmental stages”.
