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The Problem of Time in Psychoanalysis

Student: Moor Elena

Supervisor: Andrey V. Rossokhin

Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Business Consulting (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2020

Abstract The purpose of this work is to study the problem of time in psychoanalysis. More precisely, to consider the development of scientific thought from the one-sided temporal logic of the influence of time in psychoanalysis, representing both a deferred action and a retrospective of changes, and finally the two ways directionality of the influence of time in psychoanalysis. Also this work aims to investigate the phenomenon of Après-coup: the development of its understanding, interpretation, and meaning of the concept at different times and by different psychoanalytic schools and works. In this work, the tasks were set to conduct a theoretical analysis review of psychoanalytic works on the problem of time, starting with the first mention of the concept by Freud in 1897 (as the term Nachträglichkeit), including the French reading of the Freudian concept of Après-coup, as well as it’s understanding and interpretation in the works of post-freudists. For more, in this work it was targeted to consider the influence of Après-coup in clinical works and its interpretation from the description in the works of Z. Freud and B. Chervier. As a result of this work, it was revealed that the problem of time lies at the heart of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The understanding of time and its relation to it in therapy has perhaps the greatest difference between French and Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis. The psychic organization does not stop changing itself over time. Trauma does not just happen in the past; it can happen in the interaction of the present moment with the past. Après-coup is an authentic experience that gives the past a retrospective meaning. Our intuitive understanding of the present as a process between the past and the future, according to green, is illusory. In retrospect, the second event gives the first a meaning that previously existed only in the state of virtuality, along with a number of other possibilities. Another conclusion of this work is that in regression analysis, the patient does not return to a historically real state of the past, but develops a new experience to a certain extent. In this sense, transference is something new, bringing something different, through the mechanism of translation, to the past experience and thereby giving it a new meaning. Thus, Après-coup is an authentic experience that gives the past a retrospective meaning. Something that has already been said in the analysis may change its meaning in the light of a newer movement.

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