On Time
October 2022
Dr. Dale Mathers
This talk is about time. ‘The fifty-minute hour’ is the frame in which clinical work takes place, and a curiosity about the nature of time helps us understand and use the frame to give space for the unconscious to emerge. Philosophy is also part of the frame of analysis, as much as ‘arriving on time, leaving on time’ and all the other housekeeping things we do.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941), won the 1927 Nobel Prize for literature. In his time, he was seen as the world’s leading thinker. His ideas about the nature of time and free will preceded and influenced Jung. However, most Jungians are unaware of this, so I will explore these connections.
More well-known is Jung’s long friendship with another Nobel prize winner, the Austrian physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Together, they developed ideas about synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle. At first, synchronicity can seem strange, mysterious, and almost magical. However, many analysts eventually come to experience it an ordinary part of the natural world. So, though this is not a clinical paper, it looks at concepts foundational to analysis: to allowing space/ time for people to learn to form and use symbols.