Temporality and psychopathology

The paper first introduces the concept of implicit and explicit temporality, referring to time as pre-reflectively lived vs. consciously experienced. Implicit time is based on the constitutive synthesis of inner time consciousness on the one hand, and on the conative–affective dynamics of life on the other hand. Explicit time results from an interruption or negation of implicit time and unfolds itself in the dimensions of present, past and future. It is further shown that temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity are closely connected: While implicit temporality is characterised by tacit bodily functioning and by synchronisation with others, explicit temporality arises with states of desynchronisation, that is, of a retardation or acceleration of inner time in relation to external or social processes. These states often bring the body to awareness as an obstacle as well. On this basis, schizophrenia and melancholic depression are investigated as paradigm cases for a psychopathology of temporality. Major symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder, thought insertion, hallucinations or passivity experiences may be regarded as manifesting a disturbance of the constitutive synthesis of time consciousness, closely connected with a weakening of the underlying pre-reflective self-awareness or ipseity. This results in a fragmentation of the intentional arc, a loss of self-coherence and the appearance of major self-disturbances. Depression, on the other hand, is mostly triggered by a desynchronisation from the social environment and further develops into an inhibition of the conative–affective dynamics of life. As will be shown, both mental illnesses bear witness of the close connection of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity.     

Temporality and embodied self-presence

Continental Philosophy Review - As Merleau-Ponty points out, our sense of time is that of passage. This demands that we think of time both as extended—that is, as including the past and the...     

Worlds in Motion: Temporality and Historicality

ABSTRACT

Worlds are always in motion; what kind of movement is at stake? In this essay, I will argue that Heidegger moves beyond Hegel by making the concept of world central to phenomenology. But how do worlds move? As history, Heidegger says; yet his initial attempt to interpret history, in the final sections of Being and Time, is at certain moments hampered by his attempt to ground the historicality of shared world in the temporality of individual Dasein. Derrida then moves beyond Heidegger by addressing paradoxes in our understanding of time and history. This allows Derrida to introduce the ethical dimension of world from the start as we are called to acknowledge that the Other brings their own world and awaits our response. Worlds are both singular and shared; and in any case, they move (and move us).     

Temporality and the torments of time

Immersion in time gives birth to consciousness, as well as conflict and torment. When human beings developed a sense of future, they also gained the ability to anticipate threats from nature or their fellow beings. They thereby created cultures that are bastions of survival, as well as places of poetry, art and religion where they could band together and reflect upon their common plight. The practice of psychoanalysis is in many ways a temporal process, a process of remembering, for owning and elaborating a past that gives us substance, thereby providing a basis for reflective consciousness. Stimulated by Freud's early writings, Lacan, Laplanche and their successors in particular have focussed extensively on time and psychoanalysis, and their views are a central point of this discussion. A substantial case study is offered that provides concrete examples of these perspectives. A multi‐faceted view of temporality emerges, one that is more syncopated than linear or teleological. In conclusion, I will briefly discuss recent findings in the neuroscience of memory and ‘time travel’ that underpin contemporary psychoanalytic ideas in surprising ways. It is important to remember that acceptance of the contradictory nature of temporal experience can open space for increased freedom and playfulness.     

Agency,Signification, and Temporality

This paper examines the temporality of agency in Judith Butler's and Saba Mahmood's writing. I argue that Mahmood moves away from a performative understanding of agency, which focuses on relations of signification, to a corporeal understanding, which focuses on desire and sensation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson, I show how this move involves a changed model of becoming: whereas Butler imagines movement as a series of discontinuous beings, in Mahmood's case, we get an understanding of becoming.     

Schizophrenia,Temporality, and Affection

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Temporal experience and its radical alteration in schizophrenia have been one of the central objects of investigation in phenomenological psychopathology....     

Trinity, Temporality, and Open Theism

A number of thinkers today, including open theists, find reasons to attribute temporality to God. According to Robert W. Jenson, the Trinity is indispensable to a Christian concept of God, and divine temporality is essential to the meaning of the Trinity. Following the lead of early Christian thought, Jenson argues that the “persons” of the Trinity are relations, and these relations are temporal. Jenson’s insights are obscured, however, by problematic references to time as a sphere to which God is related. Schubert M. Ogden gives the notion of divine temporality coherent content by arguing that God’s actuality is best understood as an unending succession of experiences. This paper was delivered in the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

叙事医学中时间性的意义和临床价值

人类通过叙事展现自我,建构历史,叙事寓于时间之中,人的存在也与时间休戚相关。时间、叙事和医学,三者之间有着密切的联系,时间性是医学的五大叙事特征之一。在叙事和诊疗的过程中,叙事者和医生都需要厘清特定事件的逻辑,在时间序列中解释因果关系,寻求解决方案,文学和医学由此有了极强的共通性。叙事医学提醒医务人员关注时间性,并提供了许多具体的方法和案例,来提升医务人员对诊疗时机的把握能力,学会理解患者在医院时空中时间之流的体验,据此培养他们的共情能力,提高诊疗水平,并在积极的反思中,完成自我的成长和救赎。

     

Temporality and the Lyotardian Sublime: Kant between Husserl and Freud

ABSTRACT

While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a “temporal crisis” that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes “experience” in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's “unconscious affect,” this “crisis” only becomes visible in contrast to a figure of subjective temporalization the model of which, I argue, is broadly Husserlian. Approaching the sublime as a temporal crisis thus allows not only for a clearer view of the import of Lyotard's late work on the affect with regard to subjectivity, knowledge, and experience; it also reveals what that work continues to owe to a certain phenomenological analysis.     

The Psychoanalytic Conception of Trauma in Ferenczi and the Question of Temporality

A reciprocal and ongoing interaction about theory and clinical technique developed between Freud and Ferenczi in the years from 1908 to 1933. During the course of this ongoing dialogue, the concept of psychic trauma gradually transformed. Ferenczi continued to elaborate on this issue, and concluded with his work on the interaction of trauma and fantasy. Ferenczi initially refuted Freud's early trauma theses and finally conceptualized a metapsychological reformulation of trauma, an inverse development to Freud's formulations. Ferenczi highlighted two essential concepts in the theory and technique of trauma: the processes of identification and the splitting of the ego, while he stressed the enormous role of disavowal in the dynamics of trauma. The author hopes to demonstrate how Ferenczi's contributions added to developments of the concepts of disavowal and temporality, to the recovery of traumatic memory and the modification of the classical concept of interpretations.     

Time as Process and Ground: Temporality Is Not Content

This appreciative response to the commentaries clarifies the plastic quality of temporality, at the core of consciousness. Efforts to represent “it” will always remain elusive. This approach brings phenomenological philosophy to bear to broaden the usual psychoanalytic emphasis on content in the direction of core processes of consciousness that are not usually observed.     

Converting to Continuity: Temporality and Self in Eastern Orthodox Conversion Narratives

Based on interviews with converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States, this article documents and analyzes a narrative form in which conversion is described as the progressive discovery of a latent religious self that was part of one's life all along, or what I term a conversion to continuity. These findings contrast markedly with those of most contemporary conversion research, which emphasize the narration of a dramatic temporal break between converts’ past and present religious selves (epitomized by the evangelical “born‐again” genre). I examine how and why temporal continuity was a characteristic feature of these conversion accounts and demonstrate how such narratives helped constitute forms of religious experience and self‐identity that differ in important respects from those documented in previous studies. In light of these findings, I argue for a reconceptualization of continuity and discontinuity within processes of religious identity change as an institutionally anchored figure/ground relationship as opposed to an either/or dichotomy. I also highlight promising avenues for future comparative research on the relationships between time, narrative, and subjectivity across religious and secular contexts.     

Discourse as Care: A Phenomenological Consideration of Spatiality and Temporality

Scholars increasingly recognize that discourse is not a standing collection of representations for pre-existing thoughts and/or things in a pre-existing world. Still, many obstacles remain, and these seem to be inseparable from contemporary common-sense. When we ask about the nature of discourse, we are, ultimately, asking about the nature of world, the nature of the body, and also, there must be, if only tacitly, an account of space and time. Discourse, I would suggest, is a mode of evaluative praxis, a way of articulately being-concerned-with-others. But discourse is not only a finely nuanced praxis, or a sophisticated mode of cooperative action. Its powers for spatializing and temporalizing include predication in their peculiar kind of care. In general, as implying a concernful -being-with-others-being-toward-world, discourse is an intentional nexus whose capacities for spatializing and temporalizing make-room for those situations in which we find ourselves thrown, projected, and concernfully stretching along.     

Temporality and metaplasticity. Facing extension and incorporation through material engagement theory

In our everyday life, we have the genuine feeling that when something we use works very well, we forget that we are doing something that is mediated by something else. It happens when we read through our glasses, or when we drive home, or when we play guitar. In all those cases, it can be said that the device becomes an extension of our body, or that we have incorporated it. In this paper I want to discuss the extension/incorporation dichotomy as presented in contemporary cognitive sciences. I will present the state of the art in the debate in order to promote a methodological shift, namely to adopt two concept borrowed from Material Engagement Theory (MET) developed by Lambros Malafouris (2013). By advocating the concepts of temporality and metaplasticity, I will argue for two different but related things: 1) extension and incorporation don’t have to be conceived only spatially, but temporally. This shift leads to two distinctive implications: first, the sooner two entities establish a prosthetic contact, the higher the chances to reach incorporation; second, extension temporally precedes incorporation; the former being an early-staged phenomenon of – a condition of possibility for – the latter. 2) Such a temporal perspective is at the base of metaplasticity, which describes, in the context of MET, the constant, co-constitutive loop between humans and things: metaplasticity deflates the privileged role traditionally attributed to the subject in the making of phenomenal experience. Finally, I will discuss extension and incorporation in media theory, relying on the concept of radical mediation.

     

Diabetes,Chronic Illness and the Bodily Roots of Ecstatic Temporality

This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time, shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children.

Temporality in Psychosis: Loss of Lived Time in an Alien World

This article presents a model of the temporal structure of psychic life. Time is a rule-guided process. A person's psychic life, too, yields to an examination of necessary and regulated operations. To outline both the regular and the modified perception of time within psychic life, Sigmund Freud's model of the drive interaction is brought to bear on Jacques Marie Émile Lacan's understanding of psychosis. Both Freud's and Lacan's findings are explained with an eye on the temporal dimension of the psyche, temporal modifications manifested in states of psychotic delusion, and the role of time for one's meaningful engagement with the world. Psychic time is nonlinear. The future, the past, and the present must be engaged simultaneously, albeit not in the same way, to yield the sense of temporal fullness. For Freud, the cooperative functioning of the drives accounts for the sustainment of the lucid psychic life, whereas modifications in the drives’ interactions signal psychic disturbances. Lacan (1955/1993) stresses the atemporal character of the nonexistent, negated, or lost reality that pressures an individual to enter a psychotic delusion. This article makes the assumption that the psychological states in which the reckoning with time is lost are the consequences of an unsuccessful incorporation of traumatic stimuli that are caused both by outside phenomena and by the actions of an individual's inner drives. The findings of this article support the view that psychic traumas necessitate modifications to the sense of time. The findings also offer an understanding of the kinds of temporal modifications that occur in an individual's psychic life and the way in which these temporal changes lead to the experience of radical otherness that is present in some cases of psychological disturbances.     

Affecting Argumentative Action: The Temporality of Decisive Emotion

Argumentation - This paper explores the interrelations between temporality and emotion in rhetorical argumentation. It argues that in situations of uncertainty argumentation affects action via...