Temporal levels and reality testing.

Abstract

Psychoanalytic practice has tacitly assumed the existence of an absolute and objective temporal matrix in which physical, biological and psychological processes take place and to which the subjective time of the patient in therapy gets gradually attuned. But psychoanalytic thought does not demand an ontology of absolute frameworks independent of man but only an epistemology in which several visions of reality are traditional. This paper reformulates the concept of time so as to accommodate three demands which appear to be mutually exclusive. The new concept of time (1) eliminates the need for assuming that it is a feature of the world independent of man, (2) retains the advantages of the heuristic assumption that, to first approximation, there does exist an objective passage of time and (3) does not contradict the teachings of other sciences about time. Careful attention to the feeling of the uncanny as it relates to time, together with considerations of the development of the sense of time suggests that our conscious evaluation of noetic time is directed and weighted by unconscious, archaic modes of time perception. These phylogenetically old forms of the sense of reality determine the temporal character of the unconscious. The dynamics of psychic energy invested in the various levels of time seems to determine the rates at which time is experienced as passing. The feeling that time passes at right rate probably corresponds to such combination of perceived causations and temporalities which do not threaten the integrity of the ego. If, because of internal or external danger or physiological dysfunction that balance changes, so does the sense of reality and with it, the affective texture of experienced time. Judged from this perspective, the reliability of reality testing is a measure of the degree to which the patient is able to accommodate the archaic reality of primitive causations and temporalities, lodged in his fantasy, memory and dreams, and integrate them with the ambiguities of human freedom.