Abstract
Freud’s provides four ‘negative’ characteristics of the timeless unconscious: the lack of temporal order in the unconscious; the failure of the unconscious to acknowledge the passage of time; the indestructibility of the unconscious; and the inapplicability of the idea of time to the unconscious. In this chapter focuses on Freud’s notion of timelessness and asks what Freud really meant by insisting that the timeless processes of the unconscious must be understood in terms of what conscious processes are not.
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- 1.
Freud’s first topography is in evidence in the neurological framework of the ‘Project’, and clearly sets out in Chap. VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900b). It is further developed by Freud in his metapsychological papers of 1915. The second topography evolves from Freud’s introduction of the death drive in 1919 and 1920. Freud locates both topographies within a spatial model within which each system or agency has a specialised role: hence Freud’s important insistence, for example, on the incompatibility between the functions of memory, where something is necessarily retained, and perception, which is something necessarily fleeting and without trace.
- 2.
In ‘Time and the Après-Coup’, Birksted-Breen elaborates Freud’s concept of ‘isolation’ in terms of the sadistic phantasies of certain of her patients in slicing body parts; where sessions and the intervals between them are sliced into frozen instants, the associative links being cut away. She develops this concept through Bion’s notion of the attack on linking (Bion 1959), suggesting that: ‘The attack on linking is an attack on time, the link between the parents which brings the next generation, the link between patient and analyst which generates the next interpretation, the link between one moment and the next, one session and the next, which enables a process of development to take place’ (Birksted-Breen 2003, p. 1510).
- 3.
Freud makes an illuminating comparison of these mnemic symbols with London’s Charing Cross and the Monument: ‘If you take a walk through the streets of London, you will find, in front of one of the great railway termini, a richly carved Gothic column—Charing Cross. One of the old Plantagenet kings of the thirteenth century ordered the body of his beloved Queen Eleanor to be carried to Westminster; and at every stage at which the coffin rested he erected a Gothic cross. Charing Cross is the last of the monuments that commemorate the funeral cortege. At another point in the same town, not far from London Bridge, you will find a towering, and more modern, column, which is simply known as “The Monument”. It was designed as a memorial of the Great Fire, which broke out in that neighbourhood in 1666 and destroyed a large part of the city. These monuments, then, resemble hysterical symptoms in being mnemic symbols; up to that point the comparison seems justifiable. But what should we think of a Londoner who paused to-day in deep melancholy before the memorial of Queen Eleanor’s funeral instead of going about his business in the hurry that modern working conditions demand or instead of feeling joy over the youthful queen of his own heart? Or again what should we think of a Londoner who shed tears before the Monument that commemorates the reduction of his beloved metropolis to ashes although it has long since risen again in far greater brilliance? Yet every single hysteric and neurotic behaves like these two unpractical Londoners. Not only do they remember painful experiences of the remote past, but they still cling to them emotionally; they cannot get free of the past and for its sake they neglect what is real and immediate. This fixation of mental life to pathogenic traumas is one of the most significant and practically important characteristics of neurosis’ (Freud 1910, pp. 16–17).
- 4.
In On Private Madness, André Green describes this idea of an absence of a ‘no’ as an extraordinary observation by Freud because it demonstrates ‘that the non-existence of the “no” is the same as the non-existence of time’ (Green 2005, p. 260).
- 5.
In ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (Freud 1937), Freud is explicit that repression only takes place in early childhood: repression is ‘a primitive defensive measure adopted by the immature, feeble ego’ (Freud 1937, p. 383). These repressions persist, used by the ego to master instinct and later conflicts are resolved by ‘after-repression’. Thus, although repressions persist, analysis can permit the more mature ego to review them, allowing the lifting of certain repressions and a more solid reconstruction of the dams resisting others.
- 6.
Hume (1711–1776) in his Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 2004) asked how can we maintain the belief that we know certain things. How can we assume that we ‘know’ that every event has a cause: that, for example, we have knowledge that night will follow day? Hume argued that our experience only tells us what has happened, not what will happen. It is not analytically (in the philosophical sense) the case that the sun will rise tomorrow just because the sun has risen every day until now. We have no justification in our belief in causation but, nevertheless, our belief holds. Why? Because of what Hume describes as the ‘constant conjunction’ of event ‘x’ with event ‘y’; the leap of faith we make that ‘x’—say, day—having been succeeded by ‘y’—say, night—in the past will remain so connected in the future. This is belief, not knowledge, asserted Hume. Kant disagreed and set out his counter-arguments in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will be Able To Present Itself as a Science (Kant 1977) and his Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1929).
- 7.
Things-in-themselves give off ‘noumena’. These noumena are unknowable; the noumenon constituting the necessary limit to our empirical knowledge (Kant 1929, pp. 271–272 (A 253, B 310)). Our encounter with noumena is through our sensations of them which we perceive as phenomena, intuiting them in two pure forms: ‘outer’, which is the form of representation of extension and figure (so, space); and ‘inner’, which is the form of representation of succession and simultaneity (so, time) (Kant 1929, p. 66 (A 21, B 35)). Noumena and phenomena are well explained in Andrew Ward’s Kant: the Three Critiques (Ward 2006, p. 97 et seq).
- 8.
Descartes famously suggested that, as we cannot doubt that we exist, doubting only confirming the existence of the doubter, it follows that cogito, ergo sum [I think, therefore I am]. Brentano had recommended that Freud begins his philosophical reading with Descartes ‘and study all his writings because he had given philosophy a new impetus’ (Freud 1875, pp. 102–103).
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Noel-Smith, K. (2016). Timelessness is what Time is not. In: Freud on Time and Timelessness. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59721-2_7
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