Beyond the Here-and-Now: Time, Enactment and the “Untelling” in Group Psychotherapy

<i>"'Now' means nothing"</i><i>Carlo Rovelli,</i> "The Order of Time" <i>p. 40</i>"<i>Timeless is this world we are making, tenseless its language</i>"<i>Yiyun Li</i>, "Where reasons end" <i>p. 12</i>"<i>Such a 'past' is so little past that it ... is active in the present; it is present and atemporal at once</i>"<i>Dominique Scarfone</i>, "The Unpast" <i>p. 155</i><b><i>ABSTRACT</i></b>I suggest that the "here-and-now" leans on an illusion of past-present-future and obscures the multiple temporalities of many patients. I review considerations of time in psychoanalysis and Scarfone's "unpast," wherein the repressed is untouched by time and is continually repeated in a time that does not pass. The residue of trauma, neglect, and absence are unrepresented and find expression in the "untelling" of repetitions and enactments where there is no past where trauma can be located and mourned and no present from which to view the past. When the untelling of group enactments tell their story, new temporalities emerge and the unpast is transformed. The untelling becomes a lived narrative in group and the past becomes instantiated. Trauma and neglect can be mourned and new realities grow. I argue that this does not depend on patients using words and can be disrupted by doing so. A vignette illustrates these concepts.