The Time Before Us (The Unpast in W. S. Merwin,W. Benjamin,and V. Woolf)

Freud and Winnicott have expressed the opinion that if their psychoanalytic ideas are correct, then poets and writers will have thought of them first. The author of the present article, who, in a previous work, has developed the concept of “actual time” on metapsychological grounds, concurs with their opinion by showing that variants of “actual time” can be found in the works of the American poet W. S. Merwin, the British writer Virginia Woolf, and the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Their poetry, literary prose, and philosophy, respectively, are shown to resonate with the time dimension of the psychoanalytic process.