ABSTRACT
Rainer Maria Rilke records in the Sonnets to Orpheus how, after a barren period in his writing, he was released by the figure of Orpheus into fresh creativity. Do not put up a gravestone. Hans Loewald's paper 'Superego and time' proposes that, as physical structures are related to space, so psychic structures are related to time. Rosine Perelber has extended the distinction between descriptive and dynamic to the concept of apres-coup. In Marion Milner's words, 'the astounding experience of how it feels to be alive' involves living where life's temporality encounters the timelessness of 'a lifetime burning in every moment', surrounded by the different timelessness of non-being. Sigmund Freud's statement of the function of remembering has been quoted already: 'Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in the gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression'. Freud had difficulty, however, with the idea that dreams could be creative.
