A Question of Time

Essentials of Brief Dynamic Psychotherapy

Angela Molnos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429910470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Angela Molnos describes her own concept of "destructive idealization" in which splitting conceals its ultimate destructiveness, which she found so clearly in her studies with staff working with AIDS sufferers. She presented this book on the basis of her talks in 1993 and 1994.

Chapter One

Time in our times and time in psychotherapy

In this chapter some ideas are explored about the ways in which we perceive time in daily life and in psychotherapy. In it, the stark contrast between two facts is shown: one is that we live at an ever faster pace, and the other is that the pace of psychotherapies tends to be slowing down. Unless we actively do something about it, analytic therapies become longer.

The thesis proposed is that time itself-its unconscious suspension, our unconscious experience of it-is the principal lengthening factor in analytic psychotherapies. It is the magic lure of timelessness hovering over all analytic psychotherapies that makes termination of therapy so hard. Timelessness takes us away from our terror of finite time, our terror of endings, and, ultimately, our terror of death. We find comfort in the rhythms emerging from the therapeutic time-patterns, the recurrence of the sessions. The time dimension affects all of us, the therapist no less than the patient. Some aspects of the time dimension and the implications for psychotherapy are explored in this chapter.

Conceptualization of time and sense of time

Before talking about our fear of time, let us see how we conceptualize time and how we actually experience time. Conceptualization of time and sense of time are not one and the same.

We tend to conceptualize time as something absolute, that is to say, categorical, universal, fixed, and measurable. We measure it by the clock and the calendar. Time is ever-present-it always accompanies us, and it goes on forever, completely unaffected by anything else. Kronos is supreme, the father of all Gods. We visualize time mostly as a line, a ribbon, a road, or a river that stretches or flows from the past into the future, with distinct markers on it signposting segments all the way along. We progress on it from one signpost to the next.

Although this conceptualization is consonant with our life-style and works well on the whole, there are experiences that challenge it head-on. Arriving at Kennedy Airport and being confronted for the first time with the five-hour difference between London and New York or the realization of having lost a whole calendar day after crossing the International Date Line in the Pacific can shake anyone’s idea of absolute time. The appearance of the repressed during the therapy hour might also challenge the notion of linear time. It might be so vivid as to make us feel that the past itself has returned and is no longer behind us, but here with us.

How does the sense of time develop?

Our sense of time develops and grows along with consciousness (Hartocollis, 1986, p. 5). The child acquires a sense of time step by step as it emerges from the primordial symbiotic union, discovers the distinction between its mother and itself, its body, and its surroundings, and begins to come to grips with realities beyond and within its reach. The delays in getting its needs met awaken in the child a sense of time as well as a sense of reality. “The first intuition of duration appears as an interval which stands between the child and the fulfilment of its desires” (Whitrow, 1988, p. 5). Delay in the fulfilment of its wishes is also responsible for the child’s ability to distinguish between present, future, and past-in that order. “Up to the age of 18 months or more children appear to live only in the present”. Between then and 30 months, they tend to acquire a few words relating to the future, such as ‘soon’. but almost none that concerns the past… the use of ‘tomorrow’ precedes that of ‘yesterday’,…” (Whitrow, 1988, p. 6).

How the mother and other care-givers negotiate the infant’s need fulfilment and the temporary deprivations between the experience of need and its fulfilment w111 have a profound effect on the person’s emotional development, as well as on his or her sense of time. The two w111 stay closely linked. The perception and handling of real time in later life will remain loaded with the early nurturing experiences and fantasies from the past.

A person’s attitude towards time can be equated with his attitude towards authority figures. If the infant has experienced arbitrary and excessively critical authority figures, a dismissive attitude towards time may result. Neurotic “killing time” is aggression against the parent (DuBois, 1954; Wiggins, 1983, p. 63). Patients who use the so-called “narrative defence” are killing therapeutic time. In group therapy even the group-as-a-whole might be engaged in it.

We know how difficult it is for some patients to keep to the therapeutic time boundaries, how they loathe them as an expression of the therapist’s clinical coldness and indifference. For them, the time boundaries symbolize the mother’s rigid and unreasonable refusal to feed on demand. If the therapy progresses well, the same time boundaries will be perceived for what they are meant to be: the invisible walls of a safe space in which the individual or the group can hold together and be held together in order to develop.

Time in childhood

Our sense of time changes dramatically during our lives. As we grow older, time, as indicated by the clock and the calendar, appears to rush by faster and faster.

Everyone seems to remember how slowly time used to pass in childhood. A day was a long time, a week almost eternity, and beyond that a month, a year the never-never land. The agony of waiting for one’s desires or expectations to be fulfilled was hard to bear. This intense, impatient longing for the future occurs whenever the child’s basic experience of blissful, timeless, eternal present is disrupted.

No endings or death seem to exist in the childhood experience of timeless paradise (Bonaparte, 1940). The oceanic feeling of limitless contentment, of timelessness can be explained as a fantasy (or memory?)…“in which mother and child are endlessly united” (Bergler & Roheim, 1946, p. 190).

The disruption comes in the form of a parental demand, harsh words, physical pain, illness, an accident, loss of a loved object, and so on. The child wishes for the hurt, the pain, to go away and something else to come in its place: a good word from mum or dad, a miracle cure, a new pet. The wish to become older, to become an adult, is awakened. Images of a lost paradise are projected into the future. The child’s attention switches to the future and to time itself. That is when time seems to move at a snail’s pace.

Duration

Our sense of time, including our sense of duration, depends not only on our age, but also on our physical condition and mental state. They, in their turn, can be influenced by alcohol, drugs, sensory deprivation, and many other factors.

Whether a given period of time appears to be long or short will depend on where our attention is focused. The more attention we pay to time itself, as measured by clocks and calendars, the longer the same unit of time seems to last, and vice versa. Never is a minute so long as when we focus our attention on the second hand going round and round the face of our watch or on the succession of 60 numbers displacing each other on a digital clock.

A group therapy session in which a great deal has been happening often ends with remarks like: “Is it time already? I thought we had just started!” In such instances the group-as-a-whole has been intently concentrating on some issue other than time. There are other sessions in which an oceanic feeling of complete harmony, trust, and relaxation prevails and which also finish with the regret that it was over too soon. The latter is the experience of symbiotic union that touches on a sense of eternity and timelessness and bypasses real time. Furthermore, in a therapy group the time experience of the same session might be different for different members-“too short” for some, “too long” for others.

A therapy group or an individual patient who is stuck finds that time does not pass. There are furtive glances at watches or the clock. The attention is becoming focused on real time. There is frustration, unexpressed anger with the therapist. “Why does she not help us to find out what is wrong? I wish she would say something.” In a brief, time-limited therapy, be it individual or group, such blockages will be addressed immediately.

The relativity of duration can be observed and experienced through the way in which we relate to time near the end of a given interval. There is an increase in awareness of time when a given interval is about to terminate (Wiggins, 1983. p. 63–64). Many patients seem to react strongly to the last few minutes of the session. Some try to extend them, others to shorten them. Often very significant material is produced in the final minutes. At the end of a long-term therapy, once the termination date has been fixed, work is likely to intensify.

Cultural relativity of time

Another proof of the relativity of time, if we need one, lies in the great cultural differences in how we conceptualize and experience time. It is through the vehicle of the mother tongue that the child learns and develops concepts. They are the product of the culture into which the child is born and in which it is brought up. So, too, are ideas about time.

The Sioux Indians have no word for “late” or for “wait-ing”. The Sioux speaker who has not learned any other language does not know what it is to wait or to be late (Hall, 1959, p. 25). The Nuer of Sudan”… have no equivalent of our word ‘time’”. The language of the Hopi of Arizona “contains no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer to time or any of its aspects…. its verbs have no tenses” (Whitrow, 1988, pp. 8–9).

To conclude what has been said so far, I want to emphasize once more that so-called real time is a mental and cultural construct, that “… there is no unique Intuition of time that is common to all mankind…” (Whitrow, 1988, p. 10). Our ideas of space and time are mental constructs, and as such they have to be learned (p. 186).

Time’s arrow and time’s cycle

To approach the question of why and how time is a frighten-Ing issue, we first have to distinguish between time’s arrow and time’s cycle. I mentioned earlier that we tend to view time as a road, a ribbon, a straight line, or a river coming from the past, passing through the present and stretching into the future. This imagery represents a particular mental construct of time, namely the linear concept of time. It is also called time’s arrow. As we will see further on, by itself it is the most frightening concept of time.

Time’s arrow implies that every moment is unique, that “…history is an irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events” and that all “…moments, considered in proper sequence, tell a story of linked events moving in a direction” (Gould, 1988, pp. 10–11). For us Western Europeans of the twentieth century, with our linear way of looking at history, it is difficult to imagine any other ways of conceptualizing time.

Yet, there is another mental construct of time, which is completely different. It is called time’s cycle. According to this construct of time, “Fundamental states are inunanent in time, always present and never changing. Apparent motions are parts of repeating cycles,…time has no direction” (Gould, 1988, p. 11). Most people throughout history held fast to time’s cycle and have viewed time’s arrow as either unintelligible or too frightening to contemplate”. Interest in the ‘irreversible’ and the ‘new’ in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity” (Eliade, 1954, p. 48).

Western culture under the terror of time’s arrow

Contemporary Western culture has developed and exists as a function of time’s arrow. It is a prerequisite for our understanding of events. Without this linear concept of time, it would be difficult to conceive of the idea of progress or biological evolution (Morris, 1984, p. 11). “The clock has been at the center of Western technology since its invention in the Middle Ages…”(Bolter, 1984, p. 101).

Time’s arrow is linear time-one-directional, irreversible, what we consider “real” time. It implies the uniqueness of every day, of every moment of the day. They all pass one after the other and disappear for good. It is a frightening concept because it carries the inevitability of change. Our old diaries, which had served us well to plan ahead, become the concrete reminder of times gone forever, of separation anxiety and pain about loss (Bergler & Roheim, 1946, p. 190). Ultimately, the horror of time, which resides in all humans (Bonaparte, 1940), is linked to the fear of destruction and death (Hartocollis, 1986, p. 227).

In the last thirty years or so, we have been experiencing an unprecedented acceleration of linear time. The mediaeval clock has been joined by the twentieth-century computer. The microchip revolution has produced mind-boggling changes in daily living. Fast means of transport, the gathering and dissemination of information, live images from around the globe and beyond on the screens in our homes have altered our experience of time and space.

Not only has the world shrunk, but time itself seems to get shattered and fragmented at every step. Life is governed by time-schedules. We have become increasingly time-conscious, time-obsessed. We worry more about time itself than about what we actually do. “We no longer measure profound social change in generations, but rather by the decade or less.” (Mann, 1973b, pp. 8–9). Who can reconjure the emotions surrounding the Berlin Wall? Who can remember the times when Gorazde, Gornji Vakuf, Tuzla, Vukovar, Banja Luka, Srebrnica were foreign place names, devoid of meaning, Dubrovnic just an attractive holiday resort, and Sarajevo a strange-sounding town with a resonance from the First World War? Who can remember the times when we all knew for certain that genocide would never again be repeated on European soil, when its obscene synonym, “ethnic cleansing”, had not yet soiled our daily language? Since I first wrote these lines, more names have emerged from blissful obscurity. The Tutsi and the Hutu tribes in Rwanda are crying out for help. Genocide is now talked about every day. Things change faster than we can comprehend what is happening (Mann, 1973b, p. 9).

Thus, not only is time’s arrow-a terrifying concept in itself-deeply ingrained in our brains and our lives, but we also experience its continual acceleration. In today’s West-em metronomic, microchip society, we are stressed by an excess of activity as well as by the ever-present and intensifying terror of linear time. We are frightened and look for escape routes.

The civilized, leisurely ways of suspending our awareness of time’s passage-sleep, dreams, daydreams, holidays, a drink on the way home-don’t seem to work any longer. The search for escape routes from accelerating linear time becomes intense. People turn to heavy drinking, drugs, meditation, esoteric beliefs and practices. Others try to defeat linear time by working around the clock and organizing life perfectly so as to feel they have time under their control. Such an illusion becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

As time rushes by ever faster, the anxiety increases. We become more and more anxious about time and personal death. To soothe the anxiety, we demand instant gratifications and instant cures. Our own M…death becomes increasingly unacceptable. We ask medicine to eliminate death itself” (Mann, 1973b, p. 9). Given this high level of anxiety, the question arises: what is it exactly that patients and practitioners are asking psychotherapy to do?

Time in psychotherapy: prejudices against brief dynamic psychotherapy

Strangely enough, we do not seem to expect instant cures from psychotherapy. On the contracy, patients and therapists alike tend to believe that the longer an analytic psychotherapy takes, the better it is, that the more weekly sessions, the “deeper”, the more “intensive” the process w111...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Time in our times and time in psychotherapy
• 2 Brief dynamic psychotherapy
• 3 Destructive anger, healing anger, and the impulse to separate
• 4 Final, intermediate, and immediate aims of brief and other analytic therapies
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX