There's no time: Psychopathology of the temporal experience device

Abstract

This contribution focuses on some psychopathological aspects of lived time that are highlighted by the clinical perspective, which emerge during psychotherapy sessions. The aim of showing how the theme of dark suffering can be addressed through the analysis of the temporal device (understanding) that emerges from suffering (pathos), from the patient's language (sentences, terms, concepts, dialogues). Therefore, the understanding of the patient's temporal arrangement ("perception of lifetime", "representation of time", "temporal experience") appears fundamental, in the context of the clinic when three aspects of the patient are kept in mind: a) what of the language and representations that the patient uses with respect to "how-it-is-perceived" the inner time with regard to the present reality (experience) or passed through (memories); b) the transformative effect of temporal visions on the person's behavior (feedback: past on the present, present in the past, present towards the future) i.e. what sets in motion a "temporal image" and creates incessantly in the patient's world up to addressing and shaping his experiences and experiences; c) the psychic-temporal self-monitoring (meta-cognition) of which the cognitive system is capable (attention, reasoning, learning) in referring to experiences and states of mind, based on the strategies implemented to deal with negative states (anxiety, sadness, anguish, dissociation, etc.). Usually, the flow of lived time is narrated (linguistic area) and can be perceived in the patient as a) rapid, accelerated, or slowed down flow ("as if" the immediate future instinctively fell into a vortex); b) loss of awareness of lived time (the awareness of time is reduced, in such cases, to a minimum of "present", giving us the sensation of suspension, emptiness, absence, lack of time (the link with the vital sense is lost of the activity carried out and the vigilant

awareness of the passing of time also disappears); c) loss of the reality of time or confusion state (experience of lived time); d) stopping time: it is a psychic condition linked to the patient's sensation that things are immobile, never in flux. In the clinical field, it is easy to see how with time, the present and reality disappear. We feel reality as a current storm: or we feel as if "nothingness" were present, devoid of time. Naturally, every lived experience is placed in the "time-duration", appears not as a thing, and finds its place in inner temporality.