(A)TEMPORAL DIALECTIC: CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN TIMELESSNESS/TIME AND TRANSFERENCE

The intimate relationship between timelessness, time, and transference is generative in its clinical impact on analysis. A tendency to define and represent timelessness and time as opposing structures, antithetical in aim, can obscure the fertility and complexity of their relationship. The creative and transformative power of an (a)temporal dialectic is proposed whose engagement with transference destroys and creates new paradigms of human experience, presenting analyst and analysand with fresh ways of thinking and being. A brief history of timelessness and time in psychoanalysis follows their intertwined developmental path and their import in transference-countertransference experience. But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite for-malities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half formed sentences, and sights... that rise and sink.... —Virginia Woolf (1931, pp. 172–173) Protesting our image of time as a mechanized linear progression, a character in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves sinks deep into the well of human experience and retrieves time’s inseparable and underlit partner