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 PSYCHOPATHOLOGY2
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY3
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY4
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY5
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY6
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY7
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY8
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY9
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY10
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY11
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY12
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY14
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY15
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY16
‘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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY17
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY18
‘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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY19
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY20
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY21
‘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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY22
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY23
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 AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY24
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’
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY25
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’
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY26
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY27
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY28
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-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY29
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
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY30
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.
LIVED-TIME AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY31
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