“– HOW LONG IS FOREVER? – SOMETIMES ONLY ONE SECOND”: THE MEASUREMENT OF TIME AS A FACTOR OF THE UNCONSCIOUS AND FEATURES OF ITS TRANSFORMATION IN THE SUBJECT'S TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE

Abstract

In the article, the author analyzes the matter of the time of the unconscious and its transformation in the subject's traumatic experience, focusing on the research of the classics, modern French psychoanalysts, and her own clinical practice. Thinking about time and the unconscious, the author considers new challenges in how the subject's place changes in relation to the discourse (their response to it), and to global changes in the world in general, including the experience of trauma. The unconscious and time turn out to be fundamentally contradictory: if there is an unconscious, then there is no time, and if there is time, then there is consciousness. Since Lacan, psychoanalysis can no longer be understood as an awareness of the unconscious because it is an experience of catastrophe; it is an event where time helps to understand one's own history anew. Clinical practice during the war posed a challenge to specialists: how to hear someone for whom time has stopped, become homogeneous, drags on, stagnates, or breaks off? Psychoanalytic treatment takes time, but how much exactly? A psychoanalytic session should last, but for how long? The unconscious "ignores time" in the sense of “duration” – time exists only as a “repetition” that insists on being heard. And we have to hear it. Based on the logic of time proposed by Lacan (the moment of vision, the moment of understanding, the moment of completion), we must remember that in psychoanalysis, time is still an infinite concept, as is the concept of the unconscious. The time of the one who waits is like an endless thread, while there is another time that we do not see as it passes, and that is subjective time. There’s also the time of the unconscious, which ignores time itself. In this case, the trauma that resides in the unconscious is undated, and the effects of the trauma manifest themselves when we least expect them, even if anxiety often notifies of their appearance. Therefore, it is the time of the unexpected, which plunges the subject into a traumatic experience. For example, death. Trauma and the unconscious are so close to each other that they almost become synonymous. The experiences that emerge during sessions allow the subject to give a new meaning to the chain of past experiences by building a new unconscious associative series. And the persistence of the timeless unconscious determines the ways of the constitution of the chronological time. The psychoanalytic frame becomes a place for both the internal transformations of the patient and for the external transformations of the transference field. The real space, in which the joint efforts of the analyst and the patient are carried out, actually provides an opportunity for spatio-temporal representations, because the psyche has an extension, although it is not aware of it.