ABSTRACT
Issues concerning time are at the basis of psychoanalytic theory, of the analytic setting and of the clinical phenomena, encounter. They also underlies important technical and theoretical differences in psychoanalytic approaches, implicitly or explicitly. French psychoanalysts have emphasised the non-linear form of the temporality of après-coup, contrasting with the more linear developmental model of British psychoanalysts. In British psychoanalysis there is more use made of the notion of après-coup than may appear because it is not referred to in these terms. In any case, time and the 'continuity' or 'survival' of the object in its representation go hand in hand. A solution to the lack of that representation is to seek timeless states in which the object is no longer searched for. The 'reverberation time' created by the mother's and the analyst's capacity for reverie, which includes both a chronological aspect and a back-and-forth aspect between mother and infant, could be represented as spiralling in non-even ways.
