British Psychoanalytical
Society

Book Notice

Time and Memory


Rosine J. Perelberg
Published by Karnac Books 2007
Catalogue No: 25190
ISBN: 9781855754348

Synopsis
The concern with time permeates Freud's work, from "Studies on Hysteria" to "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", which point out to a network of concepts that indicate Freud's complex theories on temporality. Indeed no other psychoanalytic thinker has put forward such revolutionary vision on the dimensions of time in human existence. This volume brings together some of the most important papers written on the topic by members of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

Description
In the richness of the detailed clinical discussions the ways in which patients deal with time and memory are viewed as crucial indications about their internal world and ways of relating to their objects. Disorientation regarding time tends to reflect levels of disruption to internal object relationships, inability to mourn or to experience guilt. Examples from literature and history are considered in order to examine the power of the repetition compulsion - Nachtreglichkeit - as well as how the impossibility of bearing the mental pain can lead to the creation of a timeless world.

"The various chapters of this book explore how the psychoanalytic notions of time can find expression in clinical practice, and shed light on historical events or literary creations. Patients create a characteristic sense of time and space in the transference. Patients’ distortions of time reflect their psychopathology as well as their reactions to the temporal aspects of the psychoanalytic setting. Patients who deny the passage of time are resistant to change, to mourning, and, ultimately, death. They also, at times, deny bodily and psychic development. Examples are compared to demonstrate the unconscious processes underlying the particular time distortions being considered, their impact on the patient’s lives, and their manifestation in the clinical setting. Psychic reality is discontinuous and the structure of the discontinuities will be revealed by the impact on the patient of the temporal aspects of the psychoanalytic setting. Together, all
chapters in "Time and Memory" indicate the profound contribution that a psychoanalytic understanding of time can bring to the understanding of the history of the individual, of historical events, and to works of literature".

Rosine Jozef Perelberg, from the Introduction

Contents
Introduction - Rosine Jozef Perelberg
Chapter 1. The Construction of Heterochrony - André Green
Chapter 2. Distortions of time in the transference: some clinical and theoretical implications - James Rose
Chapter 3. ‘Making Time: Killing Time’ - Paul Williams
Chapter 4. Existence in Time: Development or Catastrophe - David Bell
Chapter 5. Regression, Curiosity and the discovery of the object - Rosemary Davies
Chapter 6. The Aztecs, Masada and The Compulsion to Repeat - Gregorio Kohon
Chapter 7 Borges, Immortality and the Circular Ruins - Catalina Bronstein

About the Author
ROSINE JOZEF PERELBERG, PhD is a Training Analyst and Supervisor, Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, where she is currently member of the Training Staff Committee. Between 2003 and 2007 she was Chair of the Curriculum Committee and served in the Admissions Committee and Education Committees. She is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Theory at University College, London. She co-edited with Joan Raphael-Leff 'Female Experience: Three generations of British women psychoanalysts on work with women' (1997). She has edited 'Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide' (1998), 'Dreaming and Thinking' (2000) and 'Freud: A Modern Reader' (2005). She has written Time, Space and Phantasy, to be published in the New Library of Psychoanalysis in 2008.

Contributors: André Green, James Rose, Paul Williams, David Bell, Rosemary Davies, Gregorio Kohon and Catalina Bronstein