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(2016) The concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer.
The question of "time" is a worthy topic of psychoanalytic inquiry, concerning at least three different levels: technical (relating to the duration of therapy), epistemological (relating to the evolution of and between diseases), and existential (relating to the analyzing subject's consciousness of himself). However, if subjective well-being is the ultimate purpose of the analytic experience, it is immediately clear that the last level also defines the previous ones. In this perspective, we can attribute an innovative role to Lacan's inquiry on time, in receiving the Freudian psychoanalytical legacy and in participating in the contemporary thought about subjective consciousness of time. Indeed, starting from the paper entitled "Logical time" (1945), Lacan completely abandons a linear notion of time: what concerns psychoanalysis is not the "real" past sequence of events in themselves, but the way these events exist "now" in memory, and the way the patient reports them. This dynamic idea of subjective temporality (indebted to Heideggerian hermeneutics as well as to Peircian semiotics) was immediately received not only by clinical therapy but also by other branches of knowledge (particularly by theory of literature, as the basis for the concept of "narrative plot"—see Brooks). Nevertheless, in his late teaching Lacan directly engages the epistemological level of time analysis, trying to offer constants to the dynamic of time consciousness. Therefore, in the last years of his Seminar, he introduces into his work the mathematical concept of topological space, and begins to delineate a close relationship between time and space from the immanent point of view of discourse theory. If "rhythm" seems to be the ultimate horizon opened by Lacan's teaching on time toward the end of his career, this perspective could mark the definitive (creative) return to Freud and anticipate some of the current most valid research in semiotics and physics. Unfortunately, the death of the French psychoanalyst resulted in this perspective remaining only barely sketched out.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24895-0_18
Full citation:
Castagna, M. (2016)., Psychoanalysis at the test of time: Jacques Lacan's teaching, in F. Santoianni (ed.), The concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 157-166.
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