Initial Thoughts on Deferred Action and Time

I will likely be thinking and writing about the role of time in therapy over the coming weeks, as I’ve been tasked with an opportunity that finds me in the position of having to think about Freud’s concept of deferred action quite a bit.  The idea is one that I think is common to the way we consider trauma in the context of therapy today, though it seems like it was a revolutionary suggestion by Freud at the time.  The idea, put simply (or as simply as one can), is that traumatic experiences are not traumatic in and of themselves, but are recognized as such when reexperienced in the context of later events which bring forth new meaning into the traumatic experience and account for our experiencing it as such.

I find myself feeling the need to workshop this a bit, as it seems profoundly simple and straightforward, and yet presumably carries a lot of implications for facets of therapy related not just to trauma, but also memory, transference/countertransference, desire, fantasy, embodiment, and structures like the Oedipal Complex and Freud’s topology of the superego, ego, and id.  As a point of departure, Loewald is the theoretician who most readily comes to mind in thinking about time as a phenomenon in psychoanalysis, given his connections to Heidegger and his interest and skill for subtly weaving phenomenology into his psychoanalytic works, writing directly at various points about time as something that should be of concern to analysts given the way in which it is woven into the nature of being and our experience of reality.

There is a foundational concern to highlight here which is the distinction between an objective and subjective view of our understanding of time.  This is pure Heideggerian Being and Time where we a distinction is drawn between time as a measurable quantity, whether understood in hours and minutes, the trajectory of the sun across the skyline, the revolutions of the seasons, and whatever other units you may chose to measure it by.  Subjective time is more in the realm of what Loewald might call the “nexus” of “past, present, and future” that is experienced as an “integration” of time, rather than a succession of the past traveling towards the future.  Subjective time is the curious process whereby we can recognize that a present moment is as much informed by the intrusion of the past and the future as it is by the unfurling expanse of the here-and-now.  It is the psychic experience of time.  For instance, as I write this, it is beginning to snow outside, and I am watching the flakes accumulate on the sidewalk.  Almost instantaneously, I notice myself recognizing the connection of the snow to the upcoming holiday season, thinking of past instances throwing on my snow suit and playing with my siblings, the fact that the next morning I will be tasked with going to shovel, followed by likely bringing my own children out to play, and worrying about whether the roads will be slick the next morning as we make our way to spend time with family over the holiday.  Each of these thoughts has some bearing on how I understand the others, centered on an experiential understanding of what it means to have lived in and projecting that forward which is an inevitable part of human nature.  Even in the youngest of infants can we begin to see some embodied understanding of the relationship between past, present, and future.  That kind of associative, non-operationalized or quantifiable relationship to time is the kind of psychic apparatus that allows signification to take place and lets the temporal dimensions of fantasy and embodied knowing reach expression.

The psychotherapeutic process could at any time be interested with either.  Objectively, there can be value in understanding in a clear sense when something “happened” or the actual duration of an experience or set of experiences.  However, we are more often primarily interested in the notion of subjective time.  That is, how it is that time is felt.  Bromberg, in a 1995 paper on resistance, notes that a non-linear relationship with time is one of the ambiguities we must be willing to navigate as part of the analytic process.  To quote him at some length:

“The hardest part of my own job as an analyst is to struggle against my natural human tendency to be pulled into linear thinking and the reassuring certainty of a past, present, and future linked in causal sequence. I am always aware that if I am not vigilant I will find myself organizing meaning along the lines of "that happened then," which led to "this happening now," and (if all goes well) will lead to "so-and-so happening later." Linear organization of meaning is inevitable, but if I let this mode dominate for too long, it is also inevitable that the work will begin to drain itself of spontaneity, and will potentially stalemate or even die. In other words, I am suggesting that what we do as analysts is, at its best, an ongoing interchange between the inherent ambiguity of human experience and the equally human "pull" to give it linear meaning.”

It is this amorphous bleeding of the boundaries of time, Heidegger’s past and future folding into one another across a moving present, that would seem to make the deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning and a relationship with the temporal nature of our existence possible, and thus is what gives the therapeutic process its curative power.  In other words, the possibility of deferred action is both the site of the potential for the signification of trauma, but conceptually, it would seem this potential for future events to be able to thrust some kind of new meaning upon the past would have to be the condition for our clients to clear the field of the painful and compulsive tendencies that arise out of that traumatizing mode.

But what is this locus of healing which is able to recruit the temporal nature of our existence in service of reducing the kind of psychic pain which brings people into the consulting room.  I have been pondering over this vexing question quite a bit lately and have been trying to bring this sensation conceptually into a lot of my work.  It is a difficult concept to articulate, primarily because it is so deeply rooted in embodiment and kind of sensing of what change actually feels like.   Though it would seem to me that this kind of relationship to the healing principles of therapy is the only one that would conceivably make sense, given that much of what brings clients to see us is not some easily articulated intellectual conundrum, but some deeply felt knowing about the world and what it does to them that is not so easily sorted out and responded to.

This idea is as old as the practice of psychotherapy as we’ve been doing it since the time of Freud.  One of the most exciting and compelling ideas most encounter in Freud is the notion that the kind of psychic disruptions he had taken up as his central concern were the consequence of a “trace of a memory”.  That is, some component of the past that was not fully apprehended by the psychological mechanisms of the patient continued to seek out representation in the present in ways that caused considerable distress and led to reenactments of the phenomena in the context of present-day relationships (transference).  For all his fondness for the sciences and attempt to develop a rational system around his ideas, Freud was also incredibly sensitive to the notion that there was a profoundly embodied element and a kind of felt-knowing that brought itself to bear on our various encounters—even if those encounters were only with our own innerworkings and mental representations.  Furthermore, this felt-knowing was organized in a non-linear temporal fashion in which what we do now carries forward into the future some past that is as yet not fully held in a way as to be properly responded to and wielded in the context of our present psychic life.

Thus, the demand becomes that we must find a way to evoke that which has been repressed and give it permission to find some expression, allowing it to organize and bring some level of signification to bear on itself.  However, if this was purely a cognitive task, the role of therapy would hardly exist in our current cultural context.  Despite some of the gripes we may carry around in terms of whether find the behaviors of others who frustrate us sensible or not, the fact of the matter is we are generally an intellectually inclined culture.  Certainly, given my office location and the general quality of public and private education in the area, my concern is never whether or not the clients I work with are “smart enough” to do therapy nor do I assume that what seems to be happening is that there is something going on that they cannot “figure out”.  No, the thing that perplexes and wreaks havoc with their life lives deeper than that.  In fact, it is oftentimes the case that part of what is exacerbating the kind of frustrations that they are experiencing is some sense that they should be smart enough to figure it out.  That somehow, the problems seem like they ought to be fairly direct, and yet…

So back to the difficult to articulate thing that it is we are trying to do in therapy.  The best metaphor I can borrow on from the psychoanalytic domain to consider what it is that these clients are in need of is Winnicott’s notion of the “containing function” of therapy.  It brings me back to the notion I have shared here, I believe originating with the psychoanalyst Paul Russel, that the only solution is that there is no solution.  Part of this interwoven nexus is that the past is the past.  We are, in the Heideggerian sense, thrown.  Those feelings that arise are not necessarily intended to be extracted but need to take a new kind of expression in terms of how they live through us.  We cannot change the details of what that past is, but we can clear the way to other possibilities of carrying it forward and reconstruct our relationship to past experiences.  How we hold it is what determines whether we can even give ourselves the freedom to allow what is already there to be with us in a way that honors the complex and inexpressible nature of our being.  Our traumas don’t necessarily need to be buried or repressed, nor do they necessarily need to be “brought out”.  They are always already there, accompanying us through the hardships of our existence.  There is beauty and wisdom in being able to contend with that.  I even now can think of clients whom I have had the pleasure of witnessing discover this thing in the moment and the sense of warmth and somber admiration I feel as I get to watch them no longer fight the conflict but rather come to realize they can merely let it be.

In a sense, there is a unification that happens.  The things we typically want to perceive as being discrete and distinct, me-them, inside-outside, subject-object, and (yes) past-present-future, are given over to the much more fused reality in which they operate.  Allowing that, we are given the gift of discovering just how much more there is to ourselves and our experience of ourselves that can be born, contained, and lived through.  The possibility of therapy is that we can offer another vessel for the client to borrow from in their seeking that containment.  And that containment can take on many dimensions familiar to us in the process of doing therapy: reframing; offering coping skills; escaping painful binaries; bringing more attention to the body and somatic processes; providing empathy, compassion, and support.  All of these, in their own way, demonstrate the adaptability of the human subject in wrestling with this everyday trauma of being a being that is finite, singular in the ways it is forced to reckon with that finitude, and in so many ways vulnerable because of the ways in which these two factors intersect.  We have it in us to be responsible to this, to create our world as we wish to live it, to always remain open to how much more there already is in front of us.