Coming to life in time

This chapter calls attention to how time plays a central role in a variety of clinical work and child development. This chapter evokes a few specific “disorders of temporality.” One group involves the blurring of past and present, especially following trauma. Most of the chapter is concerned with a more basic deficit, in the basic, implicit expectation of new experiences emerging in a forward-moving temporality. In an imaginative move, the chapter links this with the experience of an infant with an unresponsive parent, who does not respond to the baby’s feelings and gestures so as to support afford the infant’s most basic senses of personal agency. A psychoanalytic developmental approach is thus applied to show how the common sense of time as motion toward an emerging future is embedded in personal experiences of other people’s sympathetic responses. Clinical implications are drawn, often demonstrating how brief moments of analytic interaction reflect the macrocosms of the broader analytic relationship and the patient’s psychological organization. I apply this perspective to psychoanalytic work with patients with a sense of chronic lifelessness, one which is sometimes less than obvious. Attention to the analysand’s experience of time can clarify such dynamic situations.