Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXV, 2006

A MATTER OF TIME: ACTUAL TIME

AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE PAST
BY DOMINIQUE SCARFONE, M.D.

In psychoanalytic theory, space metaphors are frequently

used to describe the psychic apparatus. As for time, it is tra-
ditionally invoked under the heading of timelessness of
the unconscious, more aptly described as the resistance of the
repressed to wearing away with time. This paper examines
how the insertion of time into psychic events and structur-
al differentiation form a single process. After looking into
the parallelism between phenomenological and psychoana-
lytic views of time and differentiation, the author draws a
distinction between two time categories: chronological versus
actual. A clinical example is presented.

Drops of living past are what must be carefully pre-

served everywhere . . . as there are not too many on
the whole planet . . . . We possess no other life, no
other sap than the treasures inherited from the past
and digested, assimilated, recreated by us. Of all the
human soul’s needs, none is more vital than the past.
—Simone Weil (1943, p. 1057)1
The past is indestructible; sooner or later all things
come back, and one of the things coming back is the
project of abolishing the past.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1993, p. 69)
To be conscious is to have time.
—Emmanuel Lévinas (1971, p. 264)
1
This quotation and the two quotations immediately following were trans-
lated by the author.

807
808 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

This paper is about the work of psychoanalysis and how it is related

to being, having, and time. Being will be addressed here in terms of
the most fundamental stratum of psychic life, not directly accessi-
ble, as it belongs to a rather mythical state of narcissistic complete-
ness. Having, as we shall see, will emerge when some differentia-
tion has occurred within the state of being, with loss playing a de-
cisive role. As for time, it is a multilayered concept that I will try in
this paper to integrate more operationally into the workings of the
psyche. More generally, I will try to show that these dimensions
of experience are in fact bound together as parts of a global proc-
ess of differentiation.
The work of psychoanalysis, as we know, can be described from
many standpoints. Freud gave various versions of the ends and
mechanisms of analysis: making the unconscious conscious, guess-
ing (erraten) what is repressed and communicating it to the patient,
lifting resistances, making ego be where id was, and so on. These
were inserted into a model of the psychic apparatus based on an
essentially spatial metaphor, yielding an easy-to-grasp, visual rep-
resentation of the psyche. Freud nevertheless often referred to
the time dimension of psychic events, namely by asserting the time-
lessness of unconscious processes. Time, however, did not benefit
from an equal amount of attention on his part, so that quite late
in his life, he would observe:

Again and again I have had the impression that we have

made too little theoretical use of this fact, established be-
yond any doubt, of the inalterability by time of the re-
pressed. This seems to offer an approach to the most pro-
found discoveries. [Freud 1933, p. 74]

I will suggest that if we pay sufficient attention to the time di-

mension in the workings of psychoanalysis, we may conclude that
one of its most important goals is the production of the past. This
may seem a bit surprising: isn’t the psychoanalytic patient gener-
ally deemed a prisoner of the past? Isn’t the past what analysis is
supposed to deliver the patient from, so that he or she may enjoy
the present and resume progression toward the future? The answer
 A MATTER OF TIME 809
is yes, provided we are aware of how everyday psychoanalytic talk
fails to consider the nature and status of what we spontaneously
refer to as “the past.” We may, of course, conveniently keep calling
it “the past,” but it is actually “the repressed,” and one character-
istic of the repressed is to return, to repeat itself, at least until a
transformation occurs that turns it into history.
Philosophers have, by tradition, paid more attention to time
than have scholars in any other discipline. I will therefore borrow
mainly from two of them, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Fran-
çois Lyotard. But the reader is asked to accept these borrowings at
face value, as the purpose of this paper is not philosophical. I will
in fact use but a few remarks from these authors, inasmuch as they
seem to me to resonate usefully with—and help us shed some new
light on—Freudian metapsychology.

SPACE AND TIME

It is not easy, perhaps impossible, to speak of time without refer-
ence to space or other physical metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson
1999). Our experience is so deeply rooted in three-dimensional
space, and movement within that space is so important for the ex-
perience of our bodily selves and the world around us, that we are
naturally bent toward speaking of time itself with a spatial vocabu-
lary. My purpose is therefore not to establish a purified notion of
time, but rather to seriously consider Freud’s assertion that uncon-
scious processes are timeless, and see where this may take us re-
garding our understanding of the psyche.
Could this approach, for instance, spare us the problems we
face by relying on our strictly space-laden metaphors of the mind?
Convenient as they are, space metaphors are after all just meta-
phors, and problems arise when we try to go beyond the mere
topography of “mental space” in our effort to describe the dynam-
ic processes occurring therein. To give but one example, think of
the structural model, in which Freud’s final visual (i.e., spatial)
representation of the psychic apparatus as a vesicle of living mat-
ter—with perception and the ego at the surface, the repressed and
810 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

the drives deep inside (Freud 1923)—is not a model that can actu-
ally be put to work. It is a static figure, clearly based on a schemat-
ic model of the human body. Now, while the body is the ultimate
container of all our living processes, including those we approach
from a psychological standpoint, what matters to us most is not
the static body of anatomy, nor, for that matter, the objectified
body of physiology, but rather the living body, the corporeal exist-
ence of a human being carrying on with its life. Space contains liv-
ing and inert bodies alike, but only the living human—hence, the
living psyche—is subjectively concerned with time.2
Following Ockham’s principle of conceptual parsimony, I will
try to leave aside the spatial metaphor (confident as I am that it
will not disappear) and explore the possibility that the temporal
dimension is sufficient for the description of the workings of the
psyche in psychoanalytic terms. In so doing, I will be referring not
to the time of physics, but to the specific dimension faced by hu-
man beings capable of reflective consciousness, as this entails the
potential awareness of our finitude through the “passage of time.”
Consciousness is inseparable from existential time and chronolo-
gy. To be sure, consciousness somehow espouses the “time arrow”
of cosmology in the form of the irreversibility of individual and
collective history; this, however, is achieved at the cost of making
the past a closed chapter within the trajectory of one’s life history.
As we know, the experience of analysis teaches us that reality is
otherwise, and this has a huge impact on how we approach the
functioning psyche.
It would appear that if consciousness is strongly correlated with
the experience of time, Freud’s idea of a timeless unconscious is
a mere logical consequence of unconsciousness itself. But for the
inventor of psychoanalysis, this concept was primarily the result
of clinical observation. The description of memories emerging

2
Freud’s first model of the psyche of course constitutes another example of
a space metaphor, with the theory of the double inscription after the lifting of
repression. Freud (1915b) ponders whether, when repression is lifted, the de-re-
pressed representation “moves” from the unconscious to the preconscious, or if
it merely undergoes a functional change.
 A MATTER OF TIME 811
during treatment “with astonishing freshness”—that is, as if time
had not in the least affected them—occurs as early as 1895, in the
Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer 1895, p. 9), and remains a
constant in Freud’s conception of the mind until the very end. It
must be noted, however, that while in the beginning Freud’s con-
ception may have pointed at the return of well-formed repressed
memories, we know, from his paper on screen memories and oth-
er sources, that he did not think of memories as stable recordings
popping up from some repository “in” the unconscious. We there-
fore adhere more specifically to the Freudian theory that memo-
ries are actively constructed in the present time out of repressed
material, through forms that lend themselves to conveying some-
thing of the repressed, even though the latter—i.e., the truly time-
less substratum—is not directly accessible (Freud 1896, 1899,
1915b). The process is actually quite similar to how the manifest
dream borrows figurative material from day residues to reflect
repressed motions of desire.
We have numerous ways of verifying the clinical validity of
Freud’s take on the odd relationship between unconscious proc-
esses and chronological time. Think of the repetition compulsion,
in which redundant patterns keep coming back as if no learning
from experience occurred or no usable trace was left to mark the
time of their return. Another example is the eruption of, as it
were, “untimely” mental contents in the otherwise normal flow of
consciousness, where material that should belong to another time
emerges in the present context as a foreign body. A third example
is the fear of breakdown described by Winnicott, in which some-
thing seems to be threatening to happen in the future, whereas it
has already happened in the past, but there was no ego to register
it. Says Winnicott (1963): “The original experience of primitive ago-
ny cannot be put in the past tense” (p. 91).
Dreaming—and, as we shall see, parapraxes—provide other in-
stances where the unpast (as I would call it) steps in. Confronted
with phenomena such as these, psychoanalysis may be said to work
toward their capture in a time net, or, if one prefers, toward the in-
sertion of ordinary time into their midst.
812 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

TIME AND DIFFERENTIATION

Psychoanalysis rests primarily on the spoken word. Access to uncon-
scious processes and the transformation of timeless unconscious
elements into conscious experience—and therefore into time-lad-
en historicity—are fostered through speech. So we have before us
the task of seeing what, if anything, links the spoken word to the
insertion of time within psychic processes. In so doing, we shall see
that the link between speech and time helps accomplish a gener-
al goal of psychoanalysis, that of achieving psychic differentiation.
Let me first present a quasi-clinical example, a scene I had the
opportunity to observe from up close, although outside of my pro-
fessional endeavor, while waiting in line at the bank (this was before
the widespread presence of ATMs).
A woman stands near the counter waiting for a client to
leave so that she may swiftly go up to the teller before the
next client. This is perhaps the seventh time I have seen
her repeating the maneuver, to the great dismay of the
young teller behind the counter, who knows all too well
what the woman is going to ask once again. Eyes to the
ceiling, yet with a remnant of courteous manners, the tell-
er once again reassures the woman that, yes, her savings
are still there, and she prints one more statement to
prove it. The woman thanks her dimly but will not leave
the scene, merely stepping aside. No doubt about it:
she’s already doubting and will need yet another proof
that between the time of the last printed statement and
the present, no catastrophe has occurred—that there has
not been some confusion in the bank’s electronic circuits,
erasing her account. We are clearly prepared for another
round.
A cataclysm has probably occurred—but in the woman’s mind.
Some powerful unbinding process permits not even a 10-minute
stability of her investment in her psyche.3 A destructive motion has
3
Investment is a word that could easily—and in my view, advantageously—re-
place Strachey’s pseudoscientific translation of Besetzung with cathexis. The strong
homology of libidinal cathexis with financial investment would be thereby high-
lighted.
 A MATTER OF TIME 813
seemed to annihilate even the slightest confidence interval—as stat-
isticians would say—in her inner world. Certainly, no one could
have provided her with any final guarantee that her savings were
perfectly safe. Nevertheless, among the people waiting in line at
the bank that day, no one would have found her conduct reasona-
ble, and she herself probably knew how excessive was her need to
repeatedly verify her account.
The memory of this scene came back to me while reading a
passage in the Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty
(1945) writes that:
If the past were available to us only in the form of express
recollections, we should be tempted to continually recall
it in order to verify their existence, just as this patient
mentioned by Scheler, who had to constantly turn round
to make sure that things were still there—whereas we feel
they are behind us as an indisputable evidence. [p. 479,
translation by the author]

The problem of the woman in the bank could be understood

as one of a continuous attack on the synthesis of time. Indeed, her
paralyzing uncertainty could be conceived of more fundamentally
as an uncertainty about the persistence of her own being through-
out time. For her, time is not the continuous flow, the carrier wave
upon which physical or mental events usually seem to occur; it
looks rather like a succession of violent ridges eroding the very
feeling of continuity. Every new moment represents a destruction
of the past one, so that the familiar, seamless integration we nor-
mally experience, as the many stories of each of our days seem to
merge into the single and stable stream we call our past, just does
not seem to happen in her mind.
Interestingly enough, the synthesis of time can in turn be de-
scribed in terms of differentiation. According to Merleau-Ponty
(1962), we should not think of time as a sequence. Rather, he sug-
gests that “when time starts moving, it moves throughout its whole
length. The ‘instants’ A, B, and C are not successively in being, but
differentiate themselves from each other” (p. 487). He states: “Since,
in time, to be and to pass are synonyms, an event does not cease
814 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

being when it becomes past . . . . Time preserves what it has put

into being at the very moment it expels it from being” (p. 480).
Merleau-Ponty seems to be saying that, contrary to what we are nat-
urally brought to think, given our space-oriented conception of
the psyche, the past is not the passive container of things bygone.
The past, indeed, is our very being, and it can stay alive and evolve;
the present is the passage where the retranscription and recontext-
ualization of our past continually occur, in line with Freud’s (1895)
concept of Nachträglichkeit 4 (or deferred action, in Strachey’s trans-
lation).
In terms of differentiation, one may also consider the woman’s
fear that her savings have vanished as a result of her inability to
differentiate herself from her possessions, that is, to distinguish
between having and being. Indeed, her anxiety over the possible
loss of her savings was too pervasive to be attributed to an ordi-
nary sense of risk. It rather looked as if her possessions were not
in the domain of having, but instead were a part of her very being.
One could also say that, by clinging to her possessions with the an-
guish of potentially losing them as soon as she turns her back, she
is expressing the romantic idea that the passage of time can only
mean destruction. She therefore needs to constantly check the per-
sistence of her material possessions, as if to refute the destructive
effect she attributes to time. In this way, she seems locked in a per-
manent now, which, as we shall see, is the trademark of the uncon-
scious as we come to know it—for instance, through the repetition
compulsion.
Hence, one may surmise that rejection of the flow of time, or
rather of her own passing through time, is what brings about this
woman’s paralyzing uncertainty. From this perspective, her fear
concerning her possessions can be seen as the mirror image of a
fundamental anguish regarding the effect of time on her life in
general. It then turns out that her refusal of time—and ultimately
of death—is a refusal of being, since, as Merleau-Ponty remarks, to
be is to pass. So she is locked in a paradox: by refusing time and
4
See, among others, Modell 1990; Laplanche 1992.
 A MATTER OF TIME 815
loss, she is both wasting her time (and that of others, as we saw) and
severely crippling her very being.
Contrary to the romantic view, destruction in the psyche is not
the effect of time passing. At first glance, this may seem to contra-
dict Freud’s early view—when he thought that the repressed had
to be brought to consciousness so that its ideational content could
“wear away” (Freud and Breuer 1895, p. 9)—but this is not the case,
as the wearing away is not the equivalent of destruction. On the
contrary, by becoming conscious, thoughts are subjected to judg-
ment and compounded with other thoughts, thereby actually gen-
erating new thinking. Subjecting mental contents to time is there-
fore better conceived of as fostering transformation. What may
look like destruction in this process is actually the conservation of
something in a new form.5
As for real and damaging destruction, it rather takes the form
of the repetition compulsion, as is suggested by Borges’ aphorism
quoted at the beginning of this article. This malignant form of
circularity was, as we know, ascribed by Freud (1919, 1923) to the
“unbinding” effect of destructive forces in the psyche, subsumed
under the idea of a death drive. The repetition compulsion, how-
ever, is not a direct expression of unbinding; it rather keeps the
processes of the binding and unbinding of psychic elements
locked within a demonic, unproductive duel. Since repetition may
seem to go on forever, a tie (!) between the two processes is the ap-
parent result. But there really is no tie.
The psyche may also be crippled by too much binding, as mod-
ern history has shown with the collectively submissive psychology
of the masses united and entranced under the erotic spell of some
charismatic leader (Zaltzman 1999). In repetition, unbinding is the
real winner, as time, and therefore being, is held captive to a cir-
cular motion, resisting transformation and allowing for little nov-
elty or creativity. This probably has something to do with Freud’s
persistent contention that timelessness is a hallmark of the re-
pressed unconscious.
5
The Hegelian concept of Aufhebung—at once lifting and preserving—ap-
plies here.
816 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

FROM BEING TO HAVING

For Jean-François Lyotard, phenomenological time, i.e., time as
we experience it, is inscribed in the structure of articulate phrases.
For instance, time is introduced with the use of personal pronouns,
within an I-Thou polarity, where no two proper names can occupy
the same pronominal pole simultaneously. I and Thou are deictic,
i.e., they define two positions in the dialogue.6 For a dialogue to take
place, the proper names that occupy these pronominal places must
necessarily alternate. Writes Lyotard (1991):

To this possibility of permutation immediately corre-

sponds the sequence of two phrases, a temporality. When
addressing “Thou,” “I” expects the coming of a phrase in
which the two names will have traded their places on the
poles of destination. Such disposition is the kernel of tem-
porality in the phenomenological sense. [p. 135, transla-
tion by the author]

Notice that in Lyotard’s description, the constitution of time

also entails a differentiation similar to the one posited by Merleau-
Ponty (1945) in the passage quoted earlier. However, Lyotard is
not considering time in itself; he rather underscores the differen-
tiation as indicated and steadily confirmed by the alternating po-
sitions of the proper names on I-Thou poles of conversation. The
phenomenological sense of time emerges because Ms. A and Mr.
B must continually trade their positions of speaker and listener if
they are to really talk to each other. A phrase can only follow anoth-
er phrase.
Think now of one of Freud’s (1938a) posthumously published
aphorisms:

[Regarding] . . . “having” and “being” in children. Children

like expressing an object-relation by an identification: “I
am the object.” “Having” is the later of the two; after loss
6
Deictic is defined as “having the function of pointing out or specifying, and
having its reference determined by the context (the words ‘this,’ ‘there,’ and ‘you’
are deictic)” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary 1999).
 A MATTER OF TIME 817
of the object it relapses into “being.” Example: the breast.
“The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.” Only later: “I
have it”—that is, “I am not it.” [p. 299]

What happens if we bring together Freud’s imaginary scene

and Lyotard’s dipole? We are at first struck by one major differ-
ence: in the scene painted by Freud, the trading of places on the I-
Thou dipole is not yet realized. On the one hand, there is simply
no I and no Thou at this stage. Nothing may reply to “I am the
breast”; this is not even an articulate phrase to begin with, but
rather a virtual sentence simply inferred by Freud. Lacking the I
and the Thou, the phrase cannot yield the alternating positions.
There being no deictic, time cannot yet emerge. For there to be a
reply—a phrase to come—and therefore for the existence of alter-
nating I-Thou positions, a previous differentiation is needed. In
Freud’s virtual scene, this means passing from being to having.
Writes Freud: “Only later: ‘I have it’—that is, ‘I am not it.’” Try-
ing to think this transformation through, we soon find that it
cannot follow a simple sequence. We do not evolve from I am to I
have by way of a linear development. Reaching the stage of “I have
it—that is, I am not it” represents a major step, supported by many
implicit mental operations relating to the central notion of loss.
Hence, we must now examine how this notion is born.
Normally, loss is about something that we have. Therefore,
since we are, on the contrary, suggesting that to have is what emer-
ges from the notion of loss, we are forced to think of a loss occur-
ring even before having is realized. Losing before having—is this
even conceivable? Before we try answering this question, we may
notice that “I am the breast,” even as a virtual phrase that no infant
ever uttered as such, is still much too articulate. Indeed, the verb
to be as conjugated in this phrase is not playing its usual role as a
copula. A copula is meant to unite two different things—the sub-
ject and its predicate—whereas this Freudian sentence indicates
that there is no difference between I and breast.
In “I am the breast,” therefore, the breast is not the predicate,
and I is only a grammatical subject—that is, it refers to the subject
of the enunciated sentence, but not to the subject of enunciation
818 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

—and quite understandably so, since in the situation described by

Freud, there is no enunciation proper. To understand this better,
we shall take into account an essential difference introduced by
Lyotard between two different kinds of phrases: the articulate
phrase and the phrase of affect.
The expression phrase of affect may look like an oxymoron, as
it evokes precisely something that cannot be made into phrases. In
the hope of avoiding serious misunderstandings, we need to make
our terms more explicit. First, we must keep in mind that the term
affect—which is often used as a synonym for feeling or emotion—
has a more restrictive meaning in the present context. Here it re-
fers to what Freud mentioned as the “quantitative factor,” some-
times specified as an “amount of affect” (Affektbetrag—Freud 1915a).
Thus, affect is a name for a psychic representative that refers to
some raw material in need of being psychically elaborated; it is
not the nonverbal equivalent of something that could as well be
conveyed by words. Therefore, the term phrase of affect evokes a
phrase that is not uttered, and about which another (articulate)
phrase has yet to be created. Nevertheless, in Lyotard’s conception,
referring to a phrase is justified by the fact that language is always
summoning us, and that the unit of language that we usually deal
with is not the phoneme, but the phrase. To sum up, in Lyotard’s
(1988) own words, “human beings discover . . . that they are sum-
moned by language . . . to recognize that what remains to be
phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they
must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist” (p. 13).
This, I believe, speaks directly to the work of psychoanalysis.
Going back to the I-Thou dipole, we must consider that articu-
lating a phrase—and waiting for another phrase to come back in
reply—does not imply that the second phrase is of a similar nature
to the first one. The oncoming phrase may be a phrase of affect,
which Lyotard describes as entertaining a differend—a radical dis-
sension—with the articulate phrase. The latter is not symmetrical
to the former. A phrase of affect is a phrase that “overloads the
body-thought, the psychic apparatus,” and such overload makes for
“the presence of a phrase that does not signify (is it pleasure or
 A MATTER OF TIME 819
pain?), is not addressed (from whom, to whom?) and has no ref-
erence (what is it about?), a phrase that arrives impromptu in the
course of phrases” (Lyotard 2000, p. 75, translation by the author).
As we shall see, another important aspect of the phrase of af-
fect is that its temporality is not differentiated, as it always exists in
the now—a now that must not be mistaken for the present tense.
Writes Lyotard (1991): “I insist: the now of affect is not surround-
ed by a before and an after” (p. 136, translation by the author).
If the verb to be in “I am the breast” is not a copula, if it de-
notes not a subject and a predicate but the total identity of I and
breast, then we may conclude that, in spite of appearances to the
contrary, the whole situation belongs to the category of phrases of
affect. Indeed, were it able to articulate such a phrase, the infant
would not be an infant any more (remember that in Latin, infans
literally means “one who cannot speak”). By possessing some abil-
ity to speak, the infant would also have already distinguished be-
tween I and breast, positing them as separate elements to be re-
united by the verb am—now a true copula—and, more generally,
by the use of words that represent things. Hence, the scene be-
longs to the domain of phrases of affect.
The change required in order to bring the infant from “I am
the breast” to “I have it—that is, I am not it,” must be a change con-
cerning affect. We must therefore ask ourselves what the possible
affective meaning of such a change is. For this, we will first de-
scribe the logical aspect of the change and then consider how it
can actually occur.

THE LOGIC OF LOSS

Going from I am to I have constitutes a shattering of the totality
implied by the full (though obviously imaginary) identity of I and
breast. This breach in imaginary completeness can be thought of
as a loss of being. And since there is yet no phenomenal time in-
volved, we are also compelled to think that, from a temporal stand-
point, this loss is felt as if it had always already occurred. In other
words, a loss of being can only be conceived of retrospectively as the
820 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

loss of the illusory sense of continuity, from the standpoint of some-

one who no longer feels such continuity. Noticeably, with the ex-
pression loss of being, we are reminded of Lacan’s (1966) lack of be-
ing, or, in reverse, of Winnicott’s (1963) going on being—the basic
tendency in the infant upon which the environment will inevita-
bly impinge.
The important thing here is the sense of loss, i.e., the affective
sense that something has changed, that a difference has been intro-
duced. Loss indeed leads to the sense and the importance of hav-
ing. Only from sensing a difference can the psyche begin distin-
guishing between the thing itself and its predicates. Interestingly,
this was described by Freud as early as 1895 in the Project for a
Scientific Psychology, where he discussed the function of thought
and judgment (pp. 330-335). The effective source of such differ-
ence remains, however, to be found, and we will look for it further
on in this paper.
For now, if we go back to the scene imagined by Freud in 1938,
we posit that from the sense that a difference has been introduced,
a change ensues in which the breast is now truly a predicate, an at-
tribute, instead of being engulfed in a complete identity. This is
most important for the logic of our argument, since an attribute is
something that can be lost. So, whereas a loss of being points to-
ward the loss of some ideal, narcissistic totality (one that in reality
is nowhere to be found), we must nevertheless consider the trans-
formation it implies as a real event that we will later try to de-
scribe. Thus, except in psychotic thinking or in playful, imagina-
tive thinking, “I am the breast” ends up being a contradictory
phrase that must be left behind in order to make room for anoth-
er phrase, such as “I have it.”
Reaching this conclusion marks the simultaneous birth of the
feelings of having and not having. These are born together, since
one can never experience the feeling of having by itself. To have
something is, implicitly, to know that one may not always have it,
or that one might not have had it in the first place. Were it not for
such negation, indeed, one would not even notice one’s posses-
sions (affirmation), and hence one would relapse into being. The
 A MATTER OF TIME 821
relationship between to have and to lose, therefore, has a staunch
solidarity.
We are thus reminded of the woman at the bank: her doubts
regarding the continuity of having reflected her problem in ac-
cepting that to have always entails the risk of losing—or, better,
that loss is the intrinsic trait of every possession. By refusing the
inherent loss, the woman “fell back on being,” as Freud would
have it—that is, she identified with her possessions, struggling
against the primeval loss that at some point has marked us all.

THE REALIZATION OF LOSS

AND THE BIRTH OF TIME
By bringing together the virtual infant--breast scene proposed by
Freud and the I-Thou dipole, and discussing their logic, we have not
yet introduced temporality. We have not examined how the situa-
tion actually evolves. After having explored in the preceding sec-
tion the logic of the progression from being to having, we must
now try to appreciate how this transformation can actually occur.
We saw that such progression requires the infant to take notice of
some difference emerging and shattering the “going on being”
(Winnicott 1963). Difference is therefore another word for loss of
being.
Difference can be ascribed to many factors, but in my view it
is most usefully attributed to the impact, the impingement of the
Other. This may sound like a truism (“Otherness installs difference
—big deal!”), so we must discuss it in further detail.
In the Freudian scene we have been discussing, Otherness steps
in because the breast in question is not simply the adequate ob-
ject of the infant’s need, the “pacifier” of its inner tension. As La-
planche (1989) pointed out, it is ironic that even within the field of
psychoanalysis, one must be reminded that the breast is a signifi-
cant part of the woman’s (the mother’s) sexual endowment. The
breast, even from within the nurturing relationship with the baby,
signifies a fact of seduction. Even in the most normal situation, it
plays an excitatory role. This fact was already acknowledged by
822 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

Freud (1905) when, after he revoked his seduction theory, he nev-

ertheless spoke of the mother as an “involuntary seductress” (p. 223;
see also Freud 1938b).
Laplanche (1989) inserts this idea in a renewed, more encom-
passing theory of generalized seduction. In Laplanche’s model,
the infant is necessarily exposed to messages emanating from the
world of adult caretakers—messages contaminated by the adult’s
own repressed sexual contents. These messages are seductive in that
they “divert” (this is the primary meaning of the Latin seducere) the
innate channels of communication between adult and child, at-
tracting the child’s attention toward their enigma, initiating an un-
ending process of investigation, translation, and theorizing.7 The
seductive “breast” is therefore a metonymy for the seductive situa-
tion as a whole, for which Laplanche coined the expression funda-
mental anthropological situation. According to this view, Winnicott’s
(1963) impingement, then, does not occur due to the environment’s
failures alone; rather, it results primarily from the mother’s (the
adult’s) excitatory action, even while she is satisfying the infant’s
vital needs and tending to the baby’s continuity of being.8
To be able to take difference into account, the infant will need
to process the impact of the stimulating other. Staying with Freud’s
example of the breast, we will now consider that its excitatory role
is what causes it to take a place in the oncoming I-Thou dipole.
The excitatory breast formulates, so to speak, a first phrase of its
own, a phrase that creates some disturbance, what might be called
“noise” in the channels of communication (“normal” communica-
tion being that of the mother’s response in feeding the infant or
just appeasing it with the nipple). So, whereas a dipole is here be-
ing sketched out, it is not yet effective, since the two phrases—the
infant’s “I am the breast,” and the breast’s excitatory phrase—do not

7
From a totally different perspective, the idea of “child as theorist” has also
been put forward by cognitive psychologists Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997).
8
Gantheret (1996) and Pontalis (1997) have expressed a similar criticism of
Winnicott’s view, but Laplanche (1989) is the one who expounded the theoretical
framework that extends beyond the relation to the breast, in his theory of general-
ized seduction.
 A MATTER OF TIME 823
yet come together, and therefore do not put the alternating deic-
tic positions into motion. No time is generated from this as a re-
sult, but instead, two timeless postures come into being: that of the
infant with “I am the breast,” and that of the breast with its excita-
tory message.
Time then steps in when the infant notices that there is a mes-
sage from the other (despite its enigmatic nature) and tries to make
sense of it, to translate it. Indeed, translating means differentiat-
ing the bulk of the message into a part that can be assimilated—lit-
erally, made similar to or compatible with the ego—and a part that,
given the infant’s incapacity to fully master the excitatory aspect,
remains incompatible, intractable. Resisting translation, that part
of the message can be said to be repressed (primal repression). As
Freud (1896) wrote: “A failure of translation—this is what is known
clinically as ‘repression’” (p. 208). Thus, difference is imposed up-
on the infant not because of abstract otherness, but by way of the
excitatory character of the message emanating from the Other (in
this instance, the breast, but this is only one possible form).
Taking notice of the enigmatic message (by working at trans-
lating it) amounts to sensing the introduction of some difference,
i.e., perceiving the breach in the continuity of being and realizing
a loss of being. One way of seeing this is that loss already haunts
the object, so to speak, even before it is conceived of as an object
—that is, even prior to differentiation (Scarfone 2003). It is the
Other’s own unconscious that makes for the sheer otherness of its
message and constitutes the actual loss.9
The occurrence of the passage from being to having, the foun-
dational moment of differentiation, means that the infant is some-
what compelled to “acknowledge reception” of the message of the
Other (Scarfone 2002). Acknowledging reception means sensing
the disturbance that impinges on the apparent “going on being”
(Winnicott 1963). By accounting for what was received—that is, by
processing it, partially translating it—the infant is also sensing a
delay: the time it needs for grasping a first meaning and repudiat-
9
This is not unlike Lacan’s (1966) lack in the Other.
824 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

ing what cannot be grasped (what, in Freud’s [1895] words, “evades

being judged” [p. 334]). For the infant, this is an unfinished busi-
ness, since for all the translation achieved, the mystery of the excit-
atory message still lingers and more work will be required.
This, then, is how time enters the scene: through the work of
translation.
We can now see how the I-Thou dipole and the Infant–Breast
duality coincide. The sequence goes like this:

1. Two phrases of affect are issued, at first without inter-

acting:

A. The breast’s (the object’s, the Other’s) phrase is an

excitatory phrase of affect;

B. The infant’s primal phrase of affect is that of com-

plete identification: “I am the breast.”

Both are virtual phrases, and language is not part of the scene.

2. Sooner or later, the infant will have to acknowledge

reception of the excitatory message of the Other, even
if its processing is deferred. Thereafter (so to speak):

C. The infant partially translates the message, differen-

tiating between the parts that are compatible and
those incompatible with the emerging ego. The parts
compatible fall in the domain of the predicate, i.e.,
to have; they can therefore be lost. This means that:

D. The object can now become absent and can be ac-

knowledged as such.

Translation (C, above) and the message of absence (D) will even-
tually lead toward the ability to create more articulate phrases.
When this is achieved, the deictic dipole and temporality can begin
to operate concurrently with the advent of language. What we see,
then, is that time is introduced along with primal repression, as the lat-
ter separates what is compatible from what is incompatible, un-
 A MATTER OF TIME 825
translatable. The birth of time, therefore, occurs in parallel with
the structural differentiation of the psyche.10
It must be stressed that, whereas translation is a primal struc-
turing fact, it nevertheless operates in the psyche all the time. It
is, at any given moment, a matter of articulating—however incom-
pletely—an unarticulated phrase. In Lyotard’s view, it is the task of
taking into account something in excess of lexis or logos, i.e., in
excess of enunciation, something that presents itself as the phônè
—the Greek term for the voice and its timbre or tone. In Freudian
terms, lexis and phônè could be linked with the drives, in that lex-
is amounts to representation, while phônè is related to affect (rep-
resentation and affect being the psychic representatives of the
drives).
The fort/da example reported by Freud (1919) is a good illus-
tration of the emergence of such symbolic function. When the moth-
er leaves, she emits, so to speak, an excitator y message related to
her going away. The baby is not only frustrated by losing sight of
the mother, but also provoked into doing something about it
(translating it), both through gesture and rudimentary speech. The
baby begins by repeating the experience of loss, and only later is
he or she able to symbolize the mother’s departure and return. The
baby can now “have” the mother at will. But loss came first.

ACTUAL TIME AND THE

PRESENT TENSE
We have seen that, according to Lyotard, time emerges from the
permutation that occurs on the pronominal ends of a dialogue,
i.e., from there being two consecutive phrases. We have then ex-
amined what would be required for this to apply to the infant--
breast situation. Regarding time, we used the verb emerge, since we
posited that, for the infant, phenomenological time does not yet
exist, since the two phrases that occurred in that situation could
only be inarticulate phrases of affect. These phrases reflected two

10
Hence, psychic conflict is also entering the scene at this point.
826 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

timeless postures that did not interact as in an I-Thou dialogue;

therefore, phenomenal or chronological time did not operate.
This is not surprising, as the time of a phrase of affect—the time of
phônè—is always now. Indeed, as long as it remains disconnected
from the articulate phrase, affect has no history. In such a case, its
eruption is always an actual experience, a presentation rather than
a re-presentation.
But here an objection arises: does time really emerge? Doesn’t
producing chronological time out of the now of affect rather
amount to extracting time from time itself? Isn’t time already em-
bedded in the word now? Even more importantly, doesn’t this way
of thinking challenge the very idea of timeless unconscious proc-
esses?
Indeed, we seem to be extracting time from time itself, if only
because ordinary language necessarily implies a temporal connota-
tion, and we always speak from a time-laden standpoint. On the
other hand, when Freud speaks of a timeless unconscious, he means
that time does not seem to pass or to affect unconscious thought
processes. Pontalis (1997) also insists on this way of viewing uncon-
scious time. But we have seen that time does not pass from Mer-
leau-Ponty’s phenomenological standpoint as well. So how can
timelessness remain a distinctive feature of unconscious proces-
ses, if conscious (phenomenal) time itself does not pass?
There is a way out of this apparent impasse, and it is already
implicit in Freud’s thinking. To begin with, we have insisted, with
Lyotard (1988, 1991, 2000), that the now of a phrase of affect is not
the present tense (if this were the case, it would entail the past and
the future, the two other instances of ordinary existential time). As
for the meaning of this now, we will make it a bit clearer by calling
it actual time.11 Actual time is a preferable term here since it not
only means now, but also implies the dimension of the act (Freud’s
Agieren). It signals a time that is concrete and effective and not

11
In French psychoanalysis, the term actuel is derived from Freud’s terms Ak-
tuell and Aktual, as in Aktualneurosen, the actual neuroses. I am well aware that in
English, the word actual is already loaded with other familiar meanings, but there
seems to be no better translation available for these German terms.
 A MATTER OF TIME 827
merely a measured time span. This is congruent with the fact that
the phrase of affect is itself an act affecting, as it were, our being.
Inasmuch as it is not yet articulate, i.e., not yet translated into the
second kind of phrase, a phrase of affect is impervious to chrono-
logical time and therefore prone to repetition.
We should here refer back to the ever-fresh reminiscences of
the Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer 1895), but also, and
more importantly, to the “actual neuroses”—anxiety neurosis and
neurasthenia—that Freud (1898) considered to be lurking in the
background of unconscious fantasy and therefore not amenable to
analysis (pp. 226-270; see also Freud 1916-1917, pp. 389-ff). In our
present vocabulary, we shall say that, by contrast with the “psycho-
neuroses”—hysteria and obsessive neurosis—the actual neuroses
lack the dimension of the articulate phrase. This explains their
mainly affective (anxiety neurosis) or somatic (neurasthenia) pres-
entation. But at one point, Freud suggested that in psychoneuro-
sis, there is frequently a nucleus of actual neurosis (Freud 1916-
1917, p. 390). This statement might reveal itself to be quite useful
in solving the problem we have just encountered regarding the
timelessness of the unconscious. What if, indeed, Freud’s ideas of
the timelessness of unconscious processes and the actual nucleus
in every “psycho-neurosis” really refer to the same phenomenon?
We have seen that those processes that were not yet inscribed
in a time sequence (past-present-future) tend to repeat themselves
—that is, to occur in an ever-present form; they are presentations
instead of re-presentations, acts (Agieren) instead of thoughts, or
phrases of affect instead of articulate phrases. In this perspective,
the psychoanalytic endeavor of articulating—translating, trans-
forming—the phrase of affect is tantamount to working through
actual time—the time of the act, the time of repetition—and trans-
ferring it, however incompletely, into psychic representation.
Something amenable to articulation can and must be extracted
from the ore of inarticulate phrases of affect. In other words, we
work to transpose the now, the actual time of the unconscious, in-
to the realm of chronological time.
A phrase of affect can engender time because the actual or the
now quality of the inarticulate phrase is in itself a form of time, al-
828 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

though by no means what we usually call by that name. Such affect-

ing time or concrete time, although in need of being articulated, is
nevertheless endowed with a momentum, a thrust. For Freud, just
as affect was to be considered in terms of quantity, the drives were
said to have a physical momentum. We saw that a phrase of affect,
with its now form of time, is presenting (rather than re-presenting)
a message to the receiver. (It is worth mentioning that, just like
translation, this is not specific to the infant--adult situation, but
occurs at any age.) When a well-differentiated psychic structure is
already in place, such presentation of the inarticulate phrase of af-
fect has two possible results: either what is presented is rejected,
denied, repressed, or, to the contrary, its impact is acknowledged,
somehow shaking the psychic structure and provoking anxiety.
We shall shortly see how, provided the necessary containment is
available, temporality will then swing over from now to the present
tense, giving birth to chronological time.
This by no means implies that the process just described fol-
lows a single mode of action. In a general sense, this is what trans-
ference is all about: something actual, a presentation belonging to
the realm of Agieren, the act—something that needs to be worked
through toward representations. Sometimes words are found to
name affect, while at other times it is affect that reaches some al-
ready-present but as yet “unaffected” representation. Another fre-
quent occurrence in analysis is one in which affect presents itself
in person, so to speak—as an inarticulate phrase, provoking a ma-
jor interference, a functional aphasia in the subject, as we often
witness with slips or parapraxes. The following clinical example
will illustrate this.

EINE KLEINE KANNIBALISCHE MUSIK 12

A patient of mine, Florence, was one day trying to remember the
name of a famous pianist, “Claudio something,” whose playing she
felt was so gentle. The only name she was able to come up with at
12
Here I offer my apologies to Mozart!
 A MATTER OF TIME 829
first was Claudio Abbau, but this certainly was not it. She then
thought of Claudio Abbado, only to discard him as a conductor.
Finally, the correct name emerged: Claudio Arrau.
Now it happened that she had just dreamt of a dog, a Great
Dane attacking and devouring two men. About one of the victims,
Florence had thought in the dream: “Well done with him, so he
won’t play at being a psychoanalyst again!” No doubt, the affective
charge is important in this dream but, as we shall see, this was not
really a crude manifestation of affect. It turned out that the dream
was the end product of a series of permutations regarding both af-
fect and representations. The Great Dane, indeed, alluded to other
meanings that Florence mentioned en passant, such as in the fol-
lowing comment: “Last week, I literally stuffed myself with nuts.”
In this sentence, I could not help hearing the French sound of nuts
(noix)—this analysis being conducted in French—embedded in
the Dane (danois), and I told the patient so.
My comment elicited a series of associations from the patient
opening upon her oedipal story. Nuts and chocolate, indeed, hap-
pened to be the only foods that her mother had kept locked away
from the children, in a kitchen drawer, reserving them primari-
ly for her husband (Florence’s father). This apparently trivial fact
took on quite a significant meaning, as Florence later learned that
these foods had become one of the meager means of seduction that
her mother was still using toward her husband, whom she knew to
be a womanizer. The nut reserve was to appear in retrospect as a
way—however clumsy—of salvaging the remains of an oedipal tri-
angle that had been seriously damaged by the father. He had in-
deed pushed his womanizing close to incest when he started se-
cretly dating a young lady who, as Florence would learn much lat-
er, was none other than her best friend. Thus, the store of nuts in
reserve gave the mother some consistency, preventing her com-
plete disappearance from the oedipal scene.
Looking in retrospect at this material, the oedipal structure
appears to have been supported by a rudimentary primal scene in
which the father’s “nuts” were locked inside the mother’s “drawer.”
More interesting to me, however, is the fact that Florence’s search
830 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

for the name of the pianist resulted from the impulse provided by
the dream, as I shall now explain.
After listening to the series of surnames that came up as possi-
bly being the pianist Claudio’s, I did not know what to think of
them, so I jotted them down in a column on a sheet of paper:
ABBAU
ABBADO
ARRAU
In looking at the column, I then felt that the three names could
be superimposed, and wondered what would result if one erased
all the letters that were common to the three words. So I barred
the letters A, B, and U, which left a DO and an RR:
ABBAU
ABBADO
ARRAU
I then mentioned this to Florence, while noting (at first only
to myself) that DO was the first syllable of my first name, and that
RR felt like the growl of some hungry/angry animal. When I add-
ed this last bit of information to what I had already told Florence,
she was startled: the Great Dane of her dream had popped up, this
time not as a representation, but as something actual—not a
dream figure, but a vibrant, expressive form: a phrase of affect, or
phônè. The voracious dog was not simply evoked; it was there, in the
phônè carried over by her double slip from the actual time of her
unconscious, presenting itself as a threatening growl just when
Florence was searching for a pianist with a gentle touch.
In the following sessions, we were led, thanks to other dreams,
to the anorexia of the patient’s adolescence, as well as to the
strange illness that broke out in her mouth after her mother com-
mitted suicide—a rare ailment that threatened her with the loss
of all her teeth. These were stories she well knew—stories of re-
pressed devouring and problematic introjections—but they were
stories that, like the Great Dane of her dream, needed to be
brought back to life in the flesh (Gantheret 1996) in order to be ar-
ticulated.
 A MATTER OF TIME 831
The devouring thrust that presented itself in the transference
through the dream and within the parapraxes (where they were
more deeply embedded, but even more effective) was not (or not
yet) something evoking the past, nor was it at first really present.
The thrust was actual, and as such it was a phrase of affect that
acted on Florence’s thought processes. Only through the classic
compromise formation of her slip could this unconscious thrust
become represented in the transference. Her effort at articulating
her desire formed a word representation conveying the menacing
growl while hiding it from view. The analysis—the dislocation—of
the slip would in turn bring us down to the level of presentation of
the actual unconscious thing. Conflating the three words of Flor-
ence’s consecutive slips was only possible and productive insofar
as they belonged to another form of time. Their unconscious sta-
tus yielded the final RR by allowing them to be superimposed—
i.e., to be treated not as words with a spatially distributed sequence,
but as the timeless vehicles of something that cannot really be put
in writing: the growl of a hungry/angry beast.
My aim in presenting this vignette is not to introduce some
purportedly new psychoanalytic technique—actually, it does not
represent any customary procedure of my practice—but to illus-
trate a more general idea: the idea that parapraxes—or, for that
matter, remembering and gaining insight in analysis—do not re-
sult from simple shifts between well-organized and meaningful rep-
resentations. Rather, they are driven by what has been inarticulate,
closer to force than to meaning—tending toward meaning, to be
sure, but with no preexisting meaning that would lie there under-
cover, waiting to be found. Meaning is introduced de novo, along
with time.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
In trying to make metapsychology reside only in the dimension of
time, we have come to observe that the idea of timeless uncon-
scious processes must be questioned. How could something hu-
man escape the grip of time? We have seen, however, that for
Freud, timelessness meant at one point that repressed contents
832 DOMINIQUE SCARFONE

do not wear away. If we stick with this definition of timelessness,

we see that the repressed does carry a form of temporality, but that
it evades chronological time. In other words, the repressed is what
lies outside the past-present-future categories in which thoughts
and feelings wear away by combining with others of their kind and
being worked through into newer thinking and affect.
If the unconscious must be said to bear some form of time,
then it is in the actual form—a time without memory, since it is
the time of the thing that is always acted now. It is also the time of
the phônè, the time of manifestation, the time of the drives’ mo-
mentum, and not yet the time of articulation. Actual time is the
time of phrases of affect upon which it is the task of analysis to act
so that they can be articulated, so that they can become part of
the past and therefore give way to subjective differentiation.
As for Florence, a number of years passed before she was able
to articulate the pain of loss and absence without being engulfed
by it. Time, however, finally took hold of her story, making her
more real, more free. In a letter written to me some months after
the end of her analysis, she used the words golden dust to describe
what she had gained from our work together: gold, the incorrup-
tible, and dust, into which everything turns in the end. Florence
obviously used these words without any reference to what I have
just presented, but the two words form an apt metaphor, alluding
to time as it does not pass, and also to us as we pass through time
––hopefully knowing that our past is behind us and that we need
not look back repeatedly to make sure it is still there.

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank Lewis Kirshner, M.D., and Dawn Skor-
czewski, Ph.D., for their help with a preliminary version of this paper.

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