Lived Time and Psychopathology

LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY1

(1) TITLE: Lived-time and Psychopathology

(2) HEAD:

(3) AUTHOR: Martin Wyllie

(4) ADDRESS: 16 Gt. Western Place

Aberdeen

Scotland

(5) KEYWORDS: activity, dead time, depression, protention, retention,

synchronisation, temporality

(6) WORD COUNT: 6577

(7) MICROSOFT WORD VERSION 97 SR-2


LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

ABSTRACT: Certain psychopathological experiences have as one of their

structural aspects the experience of restructured temporality. The

general argument is that one of the microstructures of experience,

namely, temporality offers a particular perspective relevant to

certain psychopathological experiences. Temporality is connected with

the experience of the embodied human subject as being driven and

directed towards the world in terms of bodily potentiality and

capability. The dialectical relationship between the embodied human

subject and the world results in a sense of lived-time (personal

time), a lived-time that is intimately synchronised with the time of

others (world-time). Certain experiences can so dramatically alter

the temporal microstructure of experience that the personal lived-

time becomes disordered. Normally, past and future withdraw on their

own according with their nature of ‘not being’. The future is

characterised as openness to change and movement. The absence of

this openness is the closing of the future because without this

openness onto the ‘now-yet-to-come’ the future appears static and

deterministic. It is precisely when the future is experienced as a

static presence in the ‘now’ that the past no longer allows the

possibility of escape and the future does not allow openness to

change and movement. In short, both past and future become static.


This results in hopelessness as without temporal movement the

suffering becomes for the sufferer eternal suffering.

KEYWORDS: activity, dead time, depression, protention, retention,

synchronisation, temporality

This paper is concerned with ‘lived-time’ generally and how ‘lived-

time’ can become restructured during certain types of experiences

which may be characterised as pathological. Lived-time is a key

component of human experience as ‘persons as a whole are beings with

emotions, values and purposes, and (importantly) they are temporal

beings, beings who interact with their worlds in these ways over time’

(Matthews 2002, p. 60). In this paper I am interested in the ‘lived-

time’ component of temporality which is captured by the following

phrases: ‘time just flew by’, ‘it seemed to go on forever’, ‘when we

are apart it seems like an eternity’ and so on. Merleau-Ponty

convincingly observes that time is not a ‘datum of consciousness’,

and demands much more precision when he states ‘that consciousness

unfolds or constitutes time’ (1962, p. 414). The sense of temporal

movement has no contents of its own, as it is simply the exchanging

of one experience for another. For Merleau-Ponty, the existence of

time is dependent on the personal experience of the present: ‘[t]ime

exists for me only because I am situated in it, that is, because I

become aware of myself as already committed to it, […]. Time exists

for me because I have a present.’ (1962, p. 423). Lived-time is


primarily subjective because it is the experience of the way ‘time’

appears to be passing as circumscribed by the individual’s

experience. Live-time is a situational sensing of experienced time.

For example, a dull meeting lasting only sixty minutes clock time

might be reported by an attendee as ‘having gone on forever’, or a

dinner with a loved one lasting several hours seemed ‘to fly by’.

These are two examples in which lived-time respectively ‘slows down’

or ‘speeds up’ according to one’s situational context.

LIVED-TIME

Lived-time is not an endless random series of ‘now’ moments lacking

unity or coherence. ‘Now’ in lived-time is a unity of the past,

present and future, and is more than simply a succession because the

immediate ‘no-more’, ‘present’ and ‘yet-to-come’ are ordinarily

never sharply separated. The fact of our immediate experience is what

James called 'the saddle-back’ of the present (1890, p. 609 & p.

631). In short, the ‘now’ has a certain variable breadth of its own

on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two temporal

directions. Lived-time is perceived as an overall structure in which

one abstracts to the notions of past and future. Lived moments of

time are not only based on the very last moment experienced, for

experience is constituted by the whole set of moments implying that

the boundary between ‘now’, ‘no-more’ and ‘yet-to-come’ is not

strictly demarcated. In addition, the living ‘now’ has the past as

its source, just as the future will emerge from this ‘now’. There is


implied within this description of lived-time a sense of direction.

Direction in this context is activity toward the future because

activity engaged in ‘now’ has within itself a view toward its own

completion. ‘If the human subject necessarily has its being “in-the-

world”, that is, if it is necessarily embodied and actively involved

with the world, then it necessarily has past, present and future;

what someone has been in the past provides the reasons for her

present actions, which are directed toward the future’ (Matthews

2002, p. 93). The past is an integral part of lived-time and is not

simply knowledge of what has been. Rather the past is a living past,

expressions such as ‘living in the past’, ‘reliving the past’, ‘he

can’t let the past go’ are testimony to the idea of a ‘living past’.

These expressions suggest that the past is lived and re-articulated

in the present. Present activity has within its ‘thickness’ (Merleau-

Ponty 1962, p.275) a lived past which gives meaning to my present as

I derive my present intentions for action from my past reasons for

action. Lived-time in this context is what marks changes in our

experience in relation to what delineates and terminates a particular

experience. Experience is ordered by before/after relationships;

simply, experience is temporal.

Temporality has a structure analogous to the visual field in which

there is a determinate centre (‘now’) and an indeterminate fringe

(‘no-more’ and ‘yet-to-come’). On first analysis this structure can

be described as having a centre, the situational ‘now’ moment with a


focused intentional content and a periphery that is indeterminate

(no-more, just-past-now, yet-to-come). This is a temporal field

having both aspects of a determinate and indeterminate border. Part

of the indeterminate border is already past or ‘no-more’, with the

horizon reaching toward the next moment. This is the future or ‘yet-

to-come’. This temporal horizon is dynamic, as the active lived ‘now’

moment slips toward the obvious-past with the immediate ‘yet-to-come’

slipping into the ‘no-more’. ‘Active’ here means simply that I am

engaged in doing something that has a beginning, succession and end.

Here the ‘now’ appears as a unified moment, which is inseparable from

a flow of activity. For example, consider the following figure:

Figure 1 (Can be seen either as a plan-view of a pyramid or as a

corridor)

Notice the shifting of aspect perception between a plan view of a

pyramid or corridor has a certain ‘depth’ in time and this is variable

due to one’s ability to switch between these aspects. There is a sense

in which a particular aspect is ‘now’ (now it is a pyramid) and a


shift to another aspect is another ‘now’ (now it is a corridor) and

these ‘nows’ vary in depth depending on the activity of seeing either

a pyramid or a corridor. In returning to figure 1 it is clear there

are two distinct experiences, one of a corridor and one of a pyramid

which are linked by temporalisation because the underlying

temporalisation has a relative dependence on the content of the views.

Experience of the views has duration and flows into the past, and

gradually disappears into the indeterminate fringes of time. However,

how can such views be detached in the sense of having a duration and

at the same time appear to flow?

One way to view this apparent paradox is to describe ‘duration’ and

‘flow’ as coexistence aspects of lived-time. Duration and flow are

seen against the unceasing background of one’s embodied human ‘being-

in-the-world’ (Matthews 2002, pp.45-65) in which distinct temporal

events have their own duration. Nonetheless, these events with

duration follow on from other events with their own duration. Even in

the simple figure 1 example one should become aware of the experience

as a temporal experience which has both duration and flow (first it is

a pyramid which has a depth – duration in time, and then it flows from

this into the view of a corridor - again with duration in time). One’s

experience in the world is one of the dynamic changing nature of

experience resulting in the complementary sensing of lived-time.

Identifying the figure as a pyramid has a unity which first appears as

‘now’. That ‘now’ is replaced with another ‘now’ when it appears as a

corridor. The previous giveness of the pyramid slips into the past as


when an object moves from the centre to the fringe of the temporal

horizonal field. Formally, this is characterised by the pervasive

presence of a determinate/indeterminate temporal world-horizon. Any

change in the conditions of the world-horizon constitutes a shift

between the indeterminate/determinate. This dynamic shifting between

the determinate and indeterminate produces temporality. The appearance

of these temporal shifts is aligned with the activity of something

‘happening’. This is not the passage of world activity as merely

observed, but the passage of the embodied human subject through

activity. That is to say, temporality is our experience of things

happening in time and not time itself, and this correlates temporality

with the activity of the embodied human subject. Some of these points

can be further analysed as the ‘protensivity’ and ‘retensivity’ of temporality.

One can describe the present as consisting of a tripartite structure

viz. ‘protention’, the ‘now’ and ‘retention’.1 ‘Protention’ is intentional

movement toward that which is coming; an anticipation of or drive

toward the future-now as openness onto that which is yet-to-come. ‘Now’

is the embodied human subject’s current position within the world-

horizon and the intentional content as constituted by the embodied

subject in concert with the world-horizon. ‘Retention’ is a chain of

previously constituted ‘now’ moments - the just-past-now. Retensivity

and protensivity designate the experience of a present, which includes

1 The terms ‘protention’ and ‘retention’ are Husserl’s (1964, pp. 52-122). I use theseterms in a modified form, which I define in the remainder of this paragraph. The term‘potentialisation’ may be a better term for protention. However, I will retain‘retention’ and ‘protention’ as they allow one to maintain a sense of thejuxtaposition, contrast and asymmetry between the two terms.


the just-past-now and opens onto the immediate future. The embodied

subject experiences lived-time as shortages as a ‘not-yet’

(protention), and ‘no-more’ (retention). Protensivity and retensivity

are not the presence of ‘no-more’ and ‘yet-to-come’, but a convergence

and synthesis of their absence in the ‘now’: ‘the lived present holds a

past and a future within its thickness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 275)

and this ‘thickness’ is the absence of the present-just-past and the

absence of the immediate present-yet-to-come. Retention and protention

are not a holding onto the past or an anticipation of the future, but

an active presentation of the absence of both that is synthesised into

the dynamic apprehension of the ‘now’. It is not the past in the

present (it would not then be the past), but the absence of the past

which is integrated in the ‘now-moment’. It is not that the future

exists in the present but the absence of the future again caused by

the present that is integrated into the ‘now’.

One should note, however, there is no symmetry between protensivity

and retensivity. Protensivity is not an expectation that is understood

as predictable. Rather, protensivity is more like an openness which is

capable of self-movement; the appetite for making the indeterminate

determinate. In contrast, retensivity has the structure of a continuum

and retentions in themselves cannot be retroactively modified.

Furthermore, retentions set some of the boundary conditions for the

present, that in turn influence protensivity (protention being the

bounded indeterminate world-horizon). Nonetheless, despite this

asymmetry one can economically characterise protention and retention


as absences in terms of what will ‘be-no-more’ and what is ‘yet-to-

be’, both of which are absent ‘now’. To use Husserl’s example, one can

think of this in terms of listening to a melody (1964, p. 41). At any

point in listening to the melody there is the absence of the notes

previously heard and the absence of the notes not yet heard. If the

previous notes were somehow retained unmodified in the present then one

would be unable to hear the melody at all. Past notes cannot be in the

present, as they would not then be past. Also, future notes are

anticipated not in the way one would hear the notes, otherwise they

would not be future notes. It is the absence of the notes that is

experienced in both directions (James 1890, p. 609 & p. 631). The

retentional presence synthesised in the present is in terms of an absence.

The protentional presence synthesised in the present is also in terms of an

absence.

Ordinarily, past and future withdraw on their own according with their

nature of ‘not being’. As Merleau-Ponty argues ‘[p]ast and future

withdraw of their own accord from being and move over into

subjectivity in search, not of some real support, but, on the

contrary, of a possibility of not-being which accords with their

nature’ (1962, p. 412). The past and future in the present is

inconsistent with the present and destroys the notion of present and

of temporal movement. Nevertheless, the immediate-past is something

that ‘I am not cut off from […] but it would not belong to the past

unless something had altered’ (Ibid. 1962, p. 417), the immediate-past

is not isolated as I can reach it ‘through a thin layer of time’ (Ibid.


1962, p. 417). The immediate-future is also within ‘reach’ formed as

it is by potential styles of human being-in-the-world. ‘Now’ contains

the progressive absence of previously experienced ‘now’s’, and both

future and past ‘lines of intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 416)

collapse into the present resulting in anchoring one to one’s habitual

way of being-in-the-world. Both past and future are synthesised in the

‘now’; ‘now’ is loaded with the absences of what has immediately

preceded it and with what may follow it. The future is in the present

as a systematic array of potentiality and open determinations. The

past is also constituted in the present as previously experienced

determinations and engagements, thus allowing one to further

articulate and/or re-articulate past events through the movement of

one’s unfolding life. The ‘now’ is grounded in past determinations,

engagements, experiences and disappointments, which entail their

future direction. In short, the present engagement with the things of

the world preserves the past by carrying forward and developing its

potentialities. Temporality is the synthesis of the ‘now-just-past’,

present and ‘now-yet-to-come’. The present ‘already announce[s]

itself as what will soon be past, we must feel the pressure upon it of

a future intent on dispossessing it; in short the course of time must

be primarily not only the passing of present to past, but also that of

the future to the present’ (Ibid. 1962, p. 414). The future is ‘a

brooding presence moving’ (Ibid. 1962, p. 411) toward the embodied

subject characterised as an openness to change and movement. The

future is experienced by the embodied subject as a lack that is never

‘normally’ (non-pathologically) satiated as there is always another


moment which itself requires nourishment by another, and so on. In

human life the ‘now’ is experienced in an immediate manner as an

elemental part of temporality. Also, in human life the ‘yet-to-be’ (or

future) is not empty time, but is populated with ‘lines of

intentionality’. This implies the absence of every present that will

evolve from a generality of future events into a specific ‘now’.

The embodied human subject necessarily perceives the world from a

particular place in space and time and the embodied human subject is

always already in an intersubjective world. As observed by Matthews

‘[t]he world that we perceive is not timeless, but present; our

involvement with it is necessarily permeated with our habits of

perception derived from our past experience and encoded in our

bodies’ (2002, p. 92). Merleau-Ponty argues that ‘my living present

opens upon a past which I nevertheless am no longer living through,

and on a future which I do not yet live, and perhaps never shall, it

can also open on to temporalities outside my living experience and

acquire a social horizon, with the result that my world is expanded

to the dimensions of that collective history which my private

existence takes up and carries forward’ (1962, p. 433). Here lived-

time gains a social dimension and this is important within the field

of psychopathology because lived-time is a fundamental aspect of

one’s world and is important for two reasons: (i) our being-in-the-

world allows for intersubjective time (being-with-others) to play an

integral part in harmonising one’s life; and (ii) past, present and

future can become restructured in certain experiences.


Our human being-in-the-world allows for intersubjective time (being-

with) to play an integral part in harmonising one’s world because

every society, like any individual, has its own past, present and

future. The dynamic of this everyday contact with others entails a

habitual dialectic ‘synchronisation’ (Fuchs 2001, pp. 179-186).

Personal lived-time and its reference to intersubjective time are

naturally bound together in a dialectic relation of tripartite time viz.

past, present and future. Thus ‘from the beginning, the microdynamics

of everyday contact imply a habitual synchronization. They bring

about a basic feeling of being in accord with the time of the others,

and living with them in the same, intersubjective time’ (Fuchs 2001,

p. 183). It is in this sense that both personal lived-time and

intersubjective time are either in accord or in discord with each

other. This being the case the foundations for restructured

temporality are laid because certain experiences can restructure and

in some cases disorder one’s sense of temporal movement and

direction. As Fuchs observes: ‘time-relatedness of man is not a

solipsistic "existential" as Heidegger put it, nor a mere vital "time

of becoming" that runs in the individual, but primarily a lived

synchronicity with the environment and with others. It is only from

periodical desynchronizations - i.e. states of shortage, need,

incoherence, insufficiency, guilt, or separation - that the

experienced time of the "not-yet" or "no-more" results’(2001, p.

185). It is not, according to Fuchs, synchronisation that brings

about the awareness of lived-time; on the contrary, this occurs from

disturbances in lived-time resulting from biological and/or


psychosocial factors. Personal time and intersubjective time normally

unfold together; intersubjective and personal time influence each

other in an intimate dialectic exchange. This results in a sense of

being in ‘lived synchronisation’ (Minkowski 1970, p. 65) with others,

a sense of being ‘in tune’ with the time of others.

Certain experiences can knock the individual out of alignment with

others in such a way that lived personal time can become de-coupled

from intersubjective time leading to temporal restructuring. An

ordinary example of what it may be like to be de-coupled from

intersubjective time would be arriving late for a meeting and the

difficulties one has of ‘getting into the meeting’ due to the

discussion having already started. In this example, there is a sense

of being ‘left behind’, as one is not ‘in synch’ with the

intersubjective time of others. One cannot, in this situation,

anticipate the future unfolding of the meeting, so in a sense, rather

than projecting forward into the open future, the uncertain ‘closed’

future advances toward the ‘delayed individual’. The living present

of an individual opens into intersubjective time and acquires a

socially significant dimension, thus expanding the individual’s

world-horizon. A horizon that is taken up, fused with

intersubjective time and carried forward in the personal present.

As already discussed, activity or the lack of activity correlates

with ones sense of lived time. For example, inactivity makes one

aware of the ‘passage of time’ and this can manifest itself as


‘boredom’. When bored one begins to sense the stagnation of one’s

‘personal lived-time’ against the dynamic background of

intersubjective time. Movement and activity gives the measure of

intersubjective time, which shows up against one’s personal lived-

time. The habitual ways of human being-in-the-world implies, from

early childhood, a synchronisation with the dialectic rhythms of

life. For example, in terms of environmental factors including

biological patterns: wake-sleep cycles, diurnal hormone levels,

circadian rhythms; also planetary configurations: daily solar/lunar

cycles and seasonal variations, and also, in terms of one’s complex

intersubjective life, for example: family living patterns,

timetables, working practices and social protocols. From the very

start our human being-in-the-world is in accord with the time of

others and a living with them in intersubjective time. These rhythmic

processes of life are not simply passive reflexive reactions to

environmental changes because the human being actively ‘looks for’

and discovers the dialectical rhythms surrounding them in order to

attune themselves to the influences of others. Simply, the individual

is strongly influenced by their surrounding environment. More complex

conjunctions of socio-environmental rhythms (intersubjective time)

influence the individual to such an extent one could argue such

rhythms are essential to one’s ‘well’ human being-in-the-world. For

example, during certain ‘depressive episodes’ the individual may

become disengaged from intersubjective time and lives in their own

personal time whilst the intersubjective time passes the individual

by. In some temporally distorted experiences there is no future and


this has the effect of fixing the past. Intersubjective time still

flows and measured time still has duration and lapses. However,

lived-time is experienced as a pathological slowing down or stopping

of personal lived-time because it is experienced and/or ‘measured’

against intersubjective time. Fuchs calls this the loss of ‘affect

attunement’ and observes ‘[t]he affect attunement with others fails.

This is connected to the inability to participate emotionally in

other persons or things, to be attracted or affected by them.

Painfully, the patient experiences his rigidity in contrast to the

movements of life going on in his environment’ (2001, p. 185). Kupke

observes that in some depressive states: ‘[t]he melancholical subject

is suffering from a break between its own, subjective and an

extraneous objective time, and this break appears as a falling behind, as

slowing down, or even as a total standstill of subjective time [… there]

is a crack or a split between them, and if this is the case the

foundations of insanity are laid’ (2000, p. 4).

These ‘cracks’ or ‘splits’ become apparent because human activity

tends toward the future – a future that includes intersubjective

time; in the suspension of activity or radical passivity, lived-time

inverts because the future comes toward the inactive individual who

simply waits for the future to become present. This reverses

temporality because a human being’s engagement in meaningful activity

is necessarily forward-future looking. Human beings are primarily

actively directed toward the future, that is to say, their function

is goal directed intentionality: a ‘being after something’ or


‘appetitive tension’ (Fuchs 2001, p. 181). The absence of engagement

toward the future may in some cases result in an impoverished present

and past. For example, in certain experiences, as in the loss of a

loved one the individual may become desynchronised from

intersubjective time because attention is directed toward the time of

‘no-more’; as intersubjective time passes, a pre-occupation with the

loss comes and redirects the individual back into the past. This can

be characterised as a separation from intersubjective time; a

separation from the others with whom one should be ‘in synch’.

Normally, our experience includes as part of our own progressing the

time of others; in over absorption with the past one reverses the

normal direction of lived temporality; so instead of the normal

direction of lived temporality: past-present-future [Figure 2.a]; the

past obsessed individual’s personal lived-time becomes configured as

‘present-past’ [Figure 2.b].

(2.a) Normal Direction

Past Present Future

(2.b) Past-Fixated Direction

Present Past Future

Figure 2


In certain experiences, perhaps in relation to intense regret, rather

than the person projecting (2.a Present Future) into the future, the

future rushes toward the individual (2.b Present Future) because the

regretful person will not relinquish the past. For such a person the

now always fails in comparison to the past. The person cannot ‘move

on’ because meaningful activity is solely defined in the past tense.

In this way a suffering future is constructed out of the

disappointments and failures of the past. In this example the

individual suspends activity as one can only live in the present by

projecting forward into the open future. The suspension of future

orientated activity may result in the experience of ‘[t]ime as pass-

ing by, the time of ‘no-more’, comes to our consciousness in interrup-

tions of the stream of life, mainly in separations from the others

with whom our life is in synchrony. While normally the movements and

alterations of things or men are included in our own progressing,

their direction is now reversed. They advance towards us and pass on

by, while we cannot take part in their sequence any more' (Fuchs 2001,

p. 177). Here, Fuchs gives a sense in which the future is left ‘in

the wake’ (fig. 2.b) of the past insofar as it is not lived; rather

than movement toward the future in the present one lives the dead past

in the present. The lived-time of others now advances toward the ‘past

obsessed’ individual, simply passing them by, as they no longer take

part in intersubjective time. In short, one is ‘out of sync’ with

others and lags behind the changes occurring in the world, thus

preventing intersubjective time from constituting one’s world-horizon.


Intersubjective time connects us with the world of others;

intersubjective time is one of the ‘threads’ that constitute one’s

human being-in-the-world. One of these threads is lived-time and

slackening ‘the intentional threads which attach us to the world […]

brings them to notice’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. xiii). This slackening

of the ‘intentional threads’ also produces a sense of ‘dead time’.

DEAD TIME

When I lie talking all alone,Recounting what I have ill done,My thoughts on me then tyrannise,

Fear and sorrow me surprise,Whether I tarry still or go,

Methinks the time moves very slow.

Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholia (1651)

Certain types of distortions in lived-time are observed in certain

pathological states, and these disturbances have been experimentally

verified (Lewis 1967, pp. 3-15, Wyrick 1977, pp. 1441-1443, Kitamura

& Kumar 1982, pp. 15-21). Some experiences involved in the

symptomology of ‘depression’ include problems with lived-time. The

term ‘depression’ is used as a general term which subsumes the

technical and non-technical uses of the term ‘major depressive

disorder’, ‘depression’, ‘bi-polar’, uni-polar’ and the various

closely aligned subtypes of ‘major depressive disorder’ used in

psychiatric classifications. Some depressed persons appear to

experience a dilation of time. For example, they estimate lived-time

intervals to be longer than the actual objectively measured time

(Kitamura & Kumar 1982, pp. 15-21). Tellenbach reports that certain


‘melancholic situations can slow the course of existence and bring it

to the verge of stagnation' (1980, p. 148). ‘Time’ in spite of its

apparent abstract character plays a vital role in this stagnation

given that lived-time is a integral and very personal part of our

lives.

One can deploy and develop these descriptions of lived-time more

specifically in relation to some types of depressive experiences; as

Fuchs observes: ‘[t]he depressed person, so to speak, “lives time” no

longer as his own; instead it comes upon him from in front and over-

rides him’ (2001, p. 179 / fig 2.b). The future is the most important

temporal modality when considering ‘depression’. This is because the

future is the expansive world-horizon that includes the productivity

of past acts of living; the past, however, is closer to knowledge

than it is to the acts of living. The absence of this openness onto

the future is the closing of the future because without this openness

onto the ‘now-yet-to-come’ the future appears static and

deterministic. The future is normally experienced as an open absence

in the present, however, some experiences introduce the future as a

static presence in the present; in these experiences the past no

longer allows the possibility of escape because the future no longer

allows openness to change and movement. This is important in

depressive states because every situation normally (non-

pathologically) contains the possibility of change; if the future is

‘closed’ the possibility of change is denied because there is no

possibility of change without a future in which to make that change.


The future gets blocked in some depressive states by the negative

attribution that things will not get any better. This conviction

dominates the depressed person’s outlook rendering it deterministic.

Chance and contingency no longer play a role in the depressed persons

life. Without activity, temporality stops because it is that activity

which produces lived-time. This is illustrated by one of Sim’s

subjects when they report: ‘[t]here is no future, just now’ (1995, p.

68).

Ordinarily, experience is directed by the coming and going of events

in the world. The appreciation of the movement of life in the world

with the present becoming the past and the present leading to the

future for which plans are made may be disturbed in depression. Engel

has described this state as the affect of hopelessness (1967, pp.

553-555). Beck reported suicidal ideation was related to the

subject’s conceptualisation of their situation as hopeless (1963, pp.

324-333). This view has been echoed by Fraber (1968) and by Kobler

and Scotland (1964), both concluding that hopelessness could be

characterised as negative expectations about the future. ‘In

ascertaining being ill “from the start” the melancholic grasps his

past and returns to his future in ascertaining that his life will go

on so “up to the end”’ (Kupke 2000).2 The future is the dimension

toward which hope is directed. Therefore, a closing off of the future

2 Christian Kupke (2000) Text of a lecture for the 4th International Conference onPhilosophy and Psychiatry "Madness, Science and Society", Florence, August 26-29,2000; Section Psychopathology as the science of the suffering subject (original titleof the lecture: The experience of another time in melancholical time-suffering)unpublished.


may be attended by a loss of hope. A loss of hope in the future leads

one to no longer expect any pleasure in the new or in the things one

once took pleasure from, and one stops ‘looking or not looking

forward’ to doing things.

People are continually projecting into the future. This aspect of

lived-time can be characterised as a type of ‘appetitive pressure’

for there to be a future (that is a next moment and the next and so

on), and also a ‘appetitive pressure’ to abolish the past in terms of

moving on from the past. Characterised in this way temporality is a

field of shortage, which is ignored only insofar as one’s needs are

not met, because one is never satisfied by the next moment as each

moment in turn generates the potentiality of the next ‘yet-to-come’.

This need is always ‘now’ as the present is always at least partially

constituted by openness onto the future. It is not that the future is

in the present; the future as such cannot be in the present. What is

in the present is openness onto the future, and it is this openness

that has direction and intentionality toward closure and fulfilment.

In short, as the future closes the past and present become static. In

his section on the ‘Disintegration of the Notion of Time’ one of

Minkowski’s patients reports the following in relation to ‘time’: ‘I

feel the desire to act, but this produces an opposite reaction to

that of normal people; the phenomenon of stopping surges up and

causes a complete discouragement. I have the feeling of the type that

goes negatively in relation to time, I have the sensation of a

negative void.’ (1970, p. 333).


Lived-time is the sequential progression of life; lived-time is a

sensing of one event after the other, and this sense of time is

central to the embodied subject’s dialectic relationship with the

world. Phenomenological disturbances of sensed time, although not

always of great importance to the human being, are an indicator that

something is going wrong with their being-in-the-world. For example,

‘melancholic depersonalization is accompanied by a serious

disturbance of temporalization, a sense of inhibition of “becoming”’

(Kraus 1995, pp. 202-203). Additionally, even the most limited

ability to separate events into past, present and future, to estimate

duration, and to place events in sequence appears to be necessary for

intellectual processes to be carried out satisfactorily. Temporality

as a modality of personal experience can become disrupted in episodes

of depression and this has been observed clinically (Fuchs 2001,

Byron 1992, p. 41, Minkowski 1970, p.332-355), experimentally (Lewis

1967; also, Wyrick & Wyrick 1977) and phenomenologically: depressed

individuals are significantly more likely to feel that time is

passing more slowly than in control subjects (Kitamura & Kumar 1982).

Without activity within the world an individual’s sense of ‘time’ is

altered resulting in a protraction, slowing or noticing of temporal

movement resulting in an impoverished ‘now’ characterised as boredom.

A ‘loss of vital contact’ (Davidson 2001) with the world may result

in activity ‘drying up’; here one is ‘now’ isolated. Temporality

needs activity without which ‘existence’ becomes mere ‘existence’


characterised as an inability to conduct one’s business in the world.

This can be expressed, as exposure to a formal empty generalised

‘static being’ and this ‘static being’ is the collapse of temporality

and activity. This ‘formal being’ is the supporting generalised

anonymity at the core of living experience analogous to the support

the skeleton affords the lived body. A sufferer attempts to report

this collapse of temporality and activity resulting in mere being in

the following quote: ‘[o]nce I was a man, with a soul and a living

body and now I am no more than a being […] I now live on in eternity

[…] for me time no longer passes […] Everything is constantly

beginning all over again’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p.283). This eternal

reoccurrence of lived-time is in contrast to the stability of

‘becoming’ whereby an individual’s human being is characterised as a

gathering together of a life within a continuously changing temporal

world. ‘Becoming’, in this sense, is a temporisation that gathers

together the daily activities of living into a single coherent human

life under the orchestration of the embodied human subject.

‘Becoming’ in this context simply means having temporality and this

primarily entails the continuous interaction between a living being

and its environment. There is here a ‘syntony’ between the individual

and its environment in which the individual preserves its ‘becoming’

by way of drives, needs or goals of activity. The term ‘syntony’

‘alludes to the principle that allows us to vibrate in unison with

the environment, while schizoidism, on the contrary, designates the

faculty of detaching ourselves from that environment.’ (Minkowski

1970, p. 73). ‘Schizoidism’ occurs where there is a lack of ‘syntony’


with one’s world because one simply cannot ‘become’ in a void. In

contrast to a state of human ‘becoming’ (syntony), ‘mere being’

(schizoidism) can be viewed as a state of utter disconnection or de-

synchronisation which leaves the individual in an ‘impossible’ state

of existing in a void of pure formal ‘being’. The structure of

temporality resulting from this is not the experience of ‘temporality

as such’, but of a kind of ‘negative eternity’.

On condition that powerfully demonstrates a sense of ‘negative

eternity’ is Cotard Syndrome in which nihilistic delusion (Baeza, et

al. 2000, pp. 119–120, Fillastre et al. 1992, pp. 65-6, Chainho, et

al. 1994, pp. 433-5. Hamon & Ginestet 1994, pp. 425-443, Ko 1989,

pp. 277-278, Le Roux, et al. 1986, pp. 971-985) brings the individual

to a near state of ‘being- not -in-the-world’ powerfully illustrates

this.3 One could characterise such experiences as a ‘pure being’, or

to use Dr. Fuch’s beautifully illustrative metaphor which

characterise these types of experiences as ‘a “black hole” in the

world of the living’. The full-blown delusion of Cotard may come

about in different kinds of disorder (e.g. as an organic delusion),

but for depression there is a difference of degree to less serious

states of isolation and corresponding delusions. Significantly for a

continuum approach to psychopathology Cotard’s Syndrome has been

associated with depressive symptoms (Baeza, et al. 2000, pp. 119–120,

Fillastre et al. 1992, pp. 65-6, Chainho, et al. 1994, pp. 433-5.

3 The technical name for this is a Nihilistic Delusional Disorder. A rare condition described byJules Cotard (1880) as délire de négation.


Hamon & Ginestet 1994, pp. 425-443, Ko 1989, pp. 277-278, Le Roux, et

al. 1986, pp. 971-985). Merleau-Ponty also makes reference to

melancholia and his own observations appear to suggest a link between

‘depressive states’ and nihilistic delusions: ‘the most advanced

states of melancholia, in which the patient settles in the realm of

death and, so to speak, takes up his abode there’ (1962, p. 293).

For those ‘immortal’ persons suffering from Cotard’s syndrome or

‘advanced states of melancholia’ their suffering is unbearable and

infinite, and it is unbearable because infinite. With the absence of

temporal movement and the presence of suffering, suffering becomes

perpetual suffering.

Perpetual suffering, in this sense, is suffering with a beginning but

no end. Suffering is perpetual if it began, and in so beginning stops

temporal movement. Suffering without temporality is suffering that

will not end: ‘time without its roots in a present and thence a past

would no longer be time, but eternity’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 427).

This relates to the quality of suffering in that restructured or

disordered temporal suffering overwhelms the temporality normally

inherent in ‘ordinary’ suffering and every day life. Mourning is an

example of ordinary suffering which is temporal as it arises, has

extension and diminishes. This allows the mourner to untie emotional

bonds that do not correspond with the present anymore. A person who

does not bear and live through this grief remains in asynchroncy. In

some cases of severe ‘depression’ the suffering is perpetual

suffering having no imaginable end. From a third person perspective


one would say ‘restructured temporal suffering’. However, from the

individual’s first-person perspective it is endless suffering. It is

endless in the sense of having no imaginable end for the particular

sufferer because without temporality the suffering appears to the

individual to be unending suffering. As one of Lewis’s patients

reports: ‘It’s the most terrible outlook I’ve ever had to look to.

It’s all perpetual. I’ve got to suffer perpetually’ (1967, p. 4).

The phenomenology of these types of pathological experiences suggests

in some cases the sufferer can no longer participate in the world and

temporality is lost. The sufferer cannot project themselves into a

future of events and there is therefore no sense of ‘things getting

better’. The sufferer is biologically living, but the future appears

dead in terms of fulfilment. In these cases, there is no future into

which the sufferer can project into with the result that ‘becoming’

and biological freedom cannot be accomplished. Here the future

appears to be held in abeyance; and yet the sufferer experiences and

appreciates this ‘stopped’ future in the present because this stopped

future is embedded in the present. Here ‘now’ and ‘yet-to-come’ are

no longer moving apart from each other as is their being because they

are bound to one another in the suffering moment. With the future

‘closed’ the sufferer’s experience of the past also becomes

disordered because the past can no longer be experienced as a horizon

onto the open future. The past itself becomes fixed once and for all

because it cannot be abolished by any future living because the

suffering present displaces the past and future and deprives the


lived present of its value. In depressive states the new experience

replaces the old experience, but this process of renewal only affects

the content of the experience and not the actual temporal structure

of the experience. The personal present in suffering is arrested or

slowed down and this slowing down is ‘measured’ as intersubjective

time continues on its course. The present, enclosed between the

faults of the past (negative attribution) and the non-compensatory

future (future-suffering) is reduced to nothing.

CONCLUSION

This view of certain psychopathological experiences does not change

what counts as pathology nor does it cast doubt on what have been

successful ways of treating psychopathological experiences; rather, it

conceptualises psychopathology and any potential treatment in a

different way. Psychopathological experience is in this paper re-

conceptualised as a restructuring of the microstructures of

experience, which support one’s ‘being-in-the-world’; namely:

embodiment, spatiality, temporality, and intersubjectivity. Certain

psychopathological experiences compromise one’s sense of ‘self’ and

‘reality’ because such experiences are all-pervasive ways of being-in-

the-world. Psychopathological experience pervades both the higher

level structures of experience (i.e. intentional object, directedness,

meaning, context) and follows the constitution of one’s being-in-the-

world down to the supporting microstructures of experience. Some

psychopathological experiences have as one of their structural aspects


the experience of restructured temporality. Temporality is connected

with the experience of the embodied human subject as being driven and

directed towards the world in terms of bodily potentiality and

capability. The dialectical relationship between the embodied human

subject and the world results in a sense of lived-time (personal

time), a lived-time that is intimately synchronised with the time of

others (world-time). Certain pathological experiences so dramatically

alter the temporal microstructure of experience that the individual’s

sense of personal lived-time is restructured and/or disordered. In

these circumstances temporality in terms of past, present and future

become fully deployed. Normally, past and future withdraw on their own

according with their nature of ‘not being’. The future is

characterised phenomenologically as openness to change and movement.

The absence of this openness is the closing of the future because

without this openness onto the ‘now-yet-to-come’ the future appears

static and deterministic. This sense of a deterministic and static

future results in hopelessness and despair as without temporal

movement the psychopathological experience from the individual’s first

person perspective becomes eternal suffering.


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