Meaning and Morality

In psychoanalysis, tracking unconscious meanings as they emerge enables a different relationship with time, as meanings are reconfigured in relation to metaphors evolving within the work. In the unconscious, meaning is the link that permeates everything, from which our moral compass is drawn. These unconscious meanings inform our relationship to ethics, demanding that we consider motives we may not be aware of. Counter to our sense of time as linear, Bachelard offers an aesthetic rendering of time, highlighting ways in which the duration of time is broken into and reconfigured by what he terms the epiphanic instants of vertical or poetic time. Psychoanalysis allows meaning to reverberate and penetrate into narratives that had become fixed and foreclosed. Using Freud’s lens of Nachträglichkeit, which affords a different vantage point on what had been remembered, I discuss how looking backward can help reclaim meanings otherwise lost in the darkness and how appreciation of the aesthetic, figurative links underlying language helps us hold, elaborate, and transform elusive meanings. Two clinical examples are offered to illustrate ways in which vertical time emerges, after considering links between primary process, the aesthetic vertex, and the call towards authenticity that is potentiated in an encounter with self through other (204).