Discontinuities and the Experience of Time: Illness, Mortality and Psychoanalysis

When the analyst becomes ill, time stops. This paper considers the tensions between the ethical need for the analyst to go on living and not disavow mortality, and the necessity for the experience of timelessness and reverie for a psychoanalytic process. Life as we reflect on and understand it, happens in chronological time, Chronos, but the spontaneity of subjective experience takes place in Kairos. When the terrors of physical illness strike, Chronos predominates, and with it a defense against suffering and thinking to avoid the unbearable thought of life stopping. This paper reflects on the ephemerality of life and the ruptures that emerge in the analytic treatment when patient and analyst are confronted with mortality. Reviewing concepts of temporality in psychoanalysis, the “in-between space,” the author suggests that with the rupture of illness the timelessness essential to the analytic process is lost. Clinical vignettes illustrate the encroachment of mortality limiting the psychoanalytic process. The paper closes with the proposal that in reexamining the tensions between our mortality and the idealized demands of timelessness in our technique, we inevitably project our own intolerance of mortality into our patients while at the same time seeking to protect them from the analyst’s illness.