What Question Gave Rise to To Be-Analysis?
We all live by clocks and calendars, yet we do not live in the same time.
An hour of waiting may pass quickly for one person and last a lifetime for another. An event may have ended years ago, yet someone may still be living in that same moment. At other times, the future exists on the calendar, but nothing in a person’s psychic life awaits them there.
Years ago, a question began to occupy my mind:
Why does time pass quickly for some individuals and slowly for others? Why do the same individuals perceive its passage differently in another situation? And what mediates our perception of the passage of time?
Gradually, this question led me to others. How does a child come to understand that their present suffering will not last forever? How do they learn to wait? How do they tolerate absence? How do they establish a connection between what was, what is, and what may arrive in the future?
Through closer observation of my own behaviour and that of others, together with the study of the works of numerous psychoanalytic thinkers, I came to realise that there is always something—an object—with whose help we attempt to pass through time. The stronger our sense of connection and proximity to this object, the faster time seems to pass; the weaker this sense becomes, the more slowly time appears to move.
Later, in an article entitled The Riddle of Time and Space (2022), I explored the similarity between this process and the formula governing the passage of time in the physical world:
https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2021.1957146
I then began working on the concept of Transitional Time Objects, which I now call Zurvan Objects. The first article introducing these ideas secured publication in a respected psychoanalytic journal two years before The Riddle of Time and Space:
https://freeassociations.org.uk/FA_New/OJS/index.php/fa/article/view/370
To Be-Analysis began at precisely this point: with an attempt to understand how human beings become temporal beings and how disturbances in this process manifest themselves in psychopathology.
The subject of To Be-Analysis, therefore, is not merely “time.” Its central question is how human beings experience and tolerate their being in time.
In the posts that follow, I will gradually attempt to address these questions and their implications. Yet I already know that the limited space of Telegram may not allow me to do so as fully as I would like. I hope that, in the future, I will also have the opportunity to speak with you face to face.
To Be-Analysis