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The expression "[[psychic ]] temporality" does not appear as such in the writings of Sigmund [[Freud]]. In fact, it is difficult to conceive of any [[other ]] kind of temporality than psychic temporality, insofar as [[human ]] [[time ]] is concerned, whether or not it can be readily represented to the [[individual ]] [[subject]]. Psychoanalytically, psychic temporality may be defined as the way psychic [[processes ]] create their own time management and [[sense]], according to [[three ]] possibilities: [[regression]], [[fixation]], and [[anticipation]].

Freud often argued the point that in [[dreams ]] time is represented through [[space]]. He gives the example of a personage, who, in dreams, appears very diminished, as if seen the wrong way through binoculars, a figuration that he interprets not as an [[estrangement ]] in space, but one in time (1933a [1932]). Reciprocally, the [[temporal ]] contiguity of the [[associations ]] of the [[patient ]] is to be [[understood ]] as spatial contiguity, recalling in its turn a relation of [[cause ]] to effect (1905e [1900]). The succession in time of two consecutive dreams can even be upset without altering the causal relation, since it is the respective length of the dreams that then matters (1900a). From all these considerations, it emerges clearly that spatial [[representation ]] is more important than temporal representation, and allows the latter to be expressed. This is explained by the fact that the [[visual ]] is the mode of inscription of the [[infant]]'s [[memory]].

[[Fantasy]], said Freud, treats [[chronology ]] with even more indifference, insofar as fantasy "hovers, as it were, between three times—the three moments of time which our ideation involves"(1908e, p. 147). A current impression is necessary, to reawaken an instinctive movement linked to an [[event ]] from [[childhood ]] and to create, in [[imagination]], a [[situation ]] relating to a [[future ]] when the [[desire ]] would be realized.

However, in a more general sense, it is the entire psychic [[life ]] that proudly ignores time. "Neurotics," wrote Freud, "suffer from [[obsession ]] or regression" (1912-13a). Whether because it is unaware of the passage of time, or even returns to the [[past ]] when the [[present ]] becomes too [[frustrating]], every psychopathological [[form ]] ([[hysteria]], [[paranoia]], and so forth) takes, in its own way, this flight out of time that is also a flight from [[reality]]. Even more profoundly, psychic life combines simultaneously the three forms of topical, temporal, and [[formal ]] regression found in dreams and in [[neuroses]]. Freud writes: "All these three kinds of regression are, however, one at bottom and occur together as a rule; for what is older in time is more [[primitive ]] in form and in [[psychical ]] [[topography ]] lies nearer to the perceptual end" (1900a, p. 548).

Freud noted the [[total ]] [[absence ]] of the sense of time in [[psychosis ]] (1900a), but did not try to explain this. Piera Aulagnier has been concerned with demonstrating the incapacity of the [[psychotic ]] to conceive of a future time that is not just a pure [[repetition]]. She emphasized, on the one hand, the [[work ]] of autohistoricizing incumbent on the ego, a veritable laying hold of the past and even of the [[prehistory ]] of the subject; and on the other hand, the identificatory [[project ]] that allowed the ego, at every [[moment ]] of its trajectory, to imagine itself in a different [[place]], implying the possibility of [[change]]. In psychosis, where repetition dominates, the ego does not succeed in transforming the fragmentary evidence concerning it into a temporal continuity, implying a before and an after. In this [[regard]], the question of [[identity ]] and the ability to conceive of temporality seem profoundly linked.

See also: Apprenti-historien et le maítre-sorcier (L'-) [The apprentice historian and the [[master ]] sorcerer]; Archaic; Autohistorization; Boredom; [[Castration ]] [[complex]]; [[Civilization ]] and Its Discontents; [[Darwin]], [[Darwinism]], and [[psychoanalysis]]; Deferred [[action]]; [[Doubt]]; Ego [[feeling]]; Estrangement; Ethnopsychoanalysis; [[Femininity]]; [[Forgetting]]; Framework of the [[psychoanalytic ]] [[treatment]]; Free [[association]]; Group phenomenon; Historical [[truth]]; [[History ]] and psychoanalysis; Id; [[Identificatory project]]; [[Infantile]], the; [[Kantianism ]] and psychoanalysis; [[Latency ]] period; Memory; "Metapsychological [[Supplement ]] to the [[Theory ]] of Dreams"; [[Mnemic trace]]/memory trace; [[Music ]] and psychoanalysis; [[Myths]]; [[Nirvana]]; [[Nostalgia]]; "Note upon the '[[Mystic ]] [[Writing ]] Pad', A"; [[Phenomenology ]] and psychoanalysis; Prehistory; [[Primal ]] [[repression]]; Primal, the; Processes of [[development]]; Proton-pseudos; Psychic [[causality]]; Psychotic potential; Regression; Repetition; [[Screen ]] memory; [[Self]]-[[consciousness]]; [[Stage ]] (or [[phase]]); [[Symbolization]], [[process ]] of; [[Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality]]; "Theme of the Three Caskets, The"; Time; [[Unconscious]], the; [[Working]]-through.[[Bibliography]]