"We are made of time": reverberation and the elasticity of time in psychoanalysis. Negotiating different temporalities in the session.

Abstract

Inspired by Dana Birksted-Breen's ideas on reverberation time, the author explores the changeability and transformation of the sensations of time and space and their connection to early embodied phantasies in the treatment of a 10-year-old boy. The experience of time changes (summarized under "time elasticity" to reflect the various forms this can take) is lived out in the transference relationship from the beginning of the therapeutic encounter. The author proposes the simultaneous development of the capacity to accept "objective" time, the establishment of a tri-dimensional space within the self and between objects and tolerating separateness and separation. The development of a capacity for symbolic thinking and depressive anxiety, as well as acceptance of the Oedipal situation and separation, has, as Dana Birksted-Breen underlined, a fundamental effect on the acceptance of objective time. This paper also discusses the difference between dealing with the difficulty of accepting objective time under the impact of fear of death and from the terror and nameless dread arising from the phantasy of the annihilation of time.