Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis
... The seven-year-long research work of Ali Pajoohandeh on such a complex topic started at the time of his military service in the deserts of Sirja, in which he had for some time so little to do that time would never go by. This is how, after having gone through the limited analytic literature on the topic of time (see, for example, Sabbadini, 2018), and after having written about his work with a series of patients, the author revisits Freud's metapsychology by connecting the sense of time to libidinal cathexis. In other words, the more our ego invests libido in the objects and the faster we sense the passage of time -and the more it withdraws libido from the objects into itselfthe slower time passes. ...
... Colleagues around the world still know relatively little about this system, not only because of the still relative scarcityat our international congresses, of both the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA)of small discussion groups centered around our actual work with our patients. But also because many of those German colleagues who participate in international conferences tend to adopt as a model the British so-called "open-ended concept of analytic treatment" (see, for example, Sabbadini, 2014), and do not feel at ease with how the Kassensystem shapes our German daily practice, including the existence of predetermined time frames. Such an orientation, shaped as it is also by the difficult elaboration of the German past, makes it hard for many German colleagues to be as proud as they could be of how well their society can put psychoanalysis at the disposal of many of its citizensexactly in the way that Freud himself had dreamed of in 1918 (see Freud, 1919). ...
This chapter offers a critical analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), a film pervaded at first by a fairy-tale atmosphere progressively transforming into a murder story culminating in a kind of Gothic-horror finale. Here, however, the plot with its suspenseful elements remains less interesting than the psychological characterization and emotional vicissitudes of its protagonists.
After briefly introducing its director, producer (David O. Selznick), lead actors (Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine) and novelist (Daphne Du Maurier), this chapter describes the film’s narrative and reflects upon the complex personalities of its lead characters: a socially and psychologically badly assorted couple, painfully incapable to satisfy each other’s emotional needs.
The focus is on the two female dramatis personae: the troubled second Mrs. de Winter, a young and timid woman in love with her high-society husband Maxim but always feeling out of place in his wealthy environment, and the creepy Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper at the Manderley grand mansion where the couple has recently moved; her uninterrupted attachment to her late employer, the first Mrs. de Winter, displays clear morbid features, including fetishistic ones for all the objects that had belonged to her. Memories of Rebecca, the deceased but still powerfully present first Mrs. de Winter, dominate both the action and the internal world of the film’s protagonists.
One of the resons why Rebecca is relevant to psychoanalysis is because it is a movie primarily concerned with the enormous power that memories—sometimes comforting, other times disturbing ones—have in shaping people’s lives; such concepts as the replacement child, the uncanny, the shadow of the object and the presence of absence are introduced to provide a psychoanalytically informed perspective on the movie.
A autora reflete na conceção de Temporalidade em Psicanálise, sublinhando as suas contribuições para o pensamento psicanalítico, nomeadamente através do conceito de mudança psíquica. O tempo para a Física e o tempo subjetivo, constructo da Psicanálise, revolucionaram a conceção tradicional do tempo para a humanidade. A análise dos significados da categoria do tempo em Psicanálise envolve delimitações de diferentes níveis, em que passado, presente e futuro se interligam e coexistem no mesmo espaço psíquico presente. A autora percorre as conceções evolutivas de temporalidade mais significativas na obra de Freud, apoiando-se nos trabalhos de autores que se debruçaram sobre o tema, com destaque para a obra de André Green. Refere as abordagens psicanalíticas mais relevantes, abrangendo teoria e técnica, oriundas da Psicanálise Francesa — que enfatizam uma forma não linear de temporalidade do après-coup — e da Psicanálise Inglesa — com ênfase num modelo de desenvolvimento mais linear de temporalidade. As questões relacionadas com o tempo são a base da teoria psicanalítica, do setting analítico e dos fenómenos psíquicos. Ilustra, através de vinhetas clínicas, algumas questões relacionadas com a temporalidade no processo psicanalítico.
Taking Winnicott’s concept of transitional space as a starting point, I extend it to the idea of a transitional time (the temporal interval between two events) and to that of a bridge space/time – a bridge being a structure spanning an obstacle for the purpose of providing passage over it. In the process, I make reference to a variety of psychological and cultural phenomena that we experience in our daily lives, and more specifically in our analytic work. These include the transference, rites of passage, various kinds of silences, sexuality, borderline personality disorders, and the arts (in particular, music and cinema).
Time is the most important feature or fundamental describer of normal human experience and is also the most eminent forgotten element of psychoanalysis. Freud believes that the unconscious is timeless and believes that it perceives any given moment as new and immaculate. He makes very little effort to illustrate the origin of time; however, he points to the function of the Pcpt-Cs as the key to this riddle. After him, fewer psychoanalysts can be found who have systemically researched this subject, except for André Green, Hartocolles, Arlow, and Sabbadini. In this paper, I have tried to illustrate how the sense of time is related to libidinal cathexis. I have displayed, through some pathological situations such as melancholy, mania, and schizophrenia, and a clinical vignette, that the more ego invests libido in the objects, the faster we sense the passage of time and the more it withdraws libido from the objects into itself, the slower time passes. Finally, using my previous viewpoint about transitional time objects and phenomena, I have presented some ideas about an object relation account of the origin of the sense of time.
Der Beitrag bietet eine kritische Analyse von Rebecca (1940). Nach einer kurzen Vorstellung des Regisseurs (Alfred Hitchcock), des Produzenten (David O. Selznick), der Hauptdarsteller (Laurence Olivier und Joan Fontaine) und der Autorin der Romanvorlage (Daphne du Maurier) werden der Filmplot und die komplexen Persönlichkeiten der Protagonisten beschrieben. Besonders geht es um die verstörte zweite Frau de Winter, eine schüchterne junge Frau, die in ihren High-Society-Ehemann Maxim verliebt ist, sich aber in seinem wohlhabenden Umfeld stets fehl am Platz fühlt; und um die bedrohliche Frau Danvers, die Haushälterin des großen Anwesens in Manderley, in das das Paar kürzlich gezogen ist. Die Erinnerungen an Rebecca, die verstorbene, aber immer noch machtvoll präsente erste Frau de Winter, beherrschen sowohl die Handlung als auch die innere Welt der Protagonisten des Films. Eine Reihe von psychoanalytischen Konzepten, wie das Ersatzkind und die Anwesenheit von Abwesenheit, werden herangezogen, um eine psychoanalytische Perspektive auf den Film Rebecca zu bieten.
Freud in his concept of timelessness of the unconscious develops various features starting with the idea of a possible liberation from temporal limitations by the primary process and ending up regarding timelessness as a phenomenon of resistance. I take a puzzling phrase about timelessness in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life as a starting point of my investigation. By means of a graphic novel on the Wolf Man I point out three aspects of timelessness that Freud in this quotation seems to argue for. Freud’s assumptions are linked to contemporary considerations about the topic of time and to Bergson’s thoughts about duration. Finally I take the cinematic time-images (Deleuze) to show in which way the timelessness of the unconscious is part of our clinical experience.
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