Abstract
Kelly Noel-Smith develops a close reading of Freud showing how it is governance under the reality principle that provides each of us with a rhythm of engagement with the world from which comes our idea of time. She puts this into context in her scholarly review of four important processes regulated by the reality principle: refinding, remembering, mourning and loving another. She then examines Freud’s account of the endopsychic process, a topic rarely touched on in psychoanalytic literature, whereby we somehow observe and then project our inner workings. Noel-Smith persuasively argues that it was Freud’s view that this process creates the temporal frame through which we make our rhythmic explorations of the external world and, through this process, refind the temporarily absent mother rather than hallucinate her presence; grieve our losses so that we can form new attachments rather than become melancholic; and move from being in love to loving.
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Notes
- 1.
Fragments of Freud’s various ideas on time and timelessness are to be found throughout his sometimes daunting Nachlass: not only in his published works, but in biographies and reminiscences about him; in his correspondence; in his readings and the marginalia written into his books; in published and unpublished desk jottings; and in his selective use of certain sources. I explore this temporal trail in my book, Freud on Time and Timelessness (Noel-Smith 2016).
- 2.
The idea of the absent breast being the prototype of the first thought is developed by Bion (in particular, Bion 1962).
- 3.
A similar point is made in A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad, Freud’s metaphor for the functions of perception, consciousness and memory (Freud 1925a, p. 231).
- 4.
The system W.-Bw is the system Pcpt.-Cs or perceptual consciousness.
- 5.
As a footnote to the edited extract from the letter, Jones adds: ‘A little later Freud tried to picture the development of the sense of time in terms of Planck’s quantum theory’ (Jones 1957, p. 466). Max Planck’s quantum theory, published at the beginning of the twentieth century, claims that the radiation of energy from a heated body is emitted in discontinuous bursts, in parcels of energy, or quanta. The whole of Freud’s letter to Bonaparte is thus highly relevant.
- 6.
Enid Balint, for example, persuasively argues that the infant’s perception of the intervals between feeds provide the framework for the later perception of space between objects. If the time-lags between feeds are perceived as horrid and empty then space will be seen in a similar light; if open and friendly then so much the better for the infant’s later perception of space between objects (Balint and Balint 1959). More recently, Birksted-Breen has introduced the concept of ‘reverberation time’ (Birksted-Breen 2003, 2009, 2012), an extension of Bion’s notion of maternal reverie, to describe the rhythmic relationship between mother and baby and, connectedly, analyst and patient. Sabbadini, too, has written on the rhythms of the analytic encounter (Sabbadini 1989).
- 7.
This is a development of Freud’s conclusion to The Interpretation of Dreams where he says: ‘The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, which the dreamer accepts as his present, has been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible wish’ (Freud 1900, p. 783).
- 8.
Nachträglichkeit is perhaps best illustrated by Freud’s case study of the ‘Wolf Man’ (Freud 1918), whose early observation of the primal scene was given retrospective traumatic effect by later experience. Birksted-Breen’s paper, ‘Time and the après-coup’ (Birksted-Breen 2003), provides a helpful summary of the development of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, which came to prominence, she suggests, because of Lacan’s specific focus on it.
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Noel-Smith, K. (2019). Time Follows from a Wish. In: Frosh, S. (eds) New Voices in Psychosocial Studies. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32758-3_5
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