Freudian Time
Dear Dr. Freud:
I feel cheated. You promised me a full analytic hour and all I get are sixty seconds. But perhaps, the hour seems just short to me. Time is relative. I know you tried to prove this in your Interpretation of Dreams, a book published in 1899, but issued with the imprint of 1900, because it should be of no fleeting fame, but of a century.
A second, an hour, a century: In the dreams that you describe, time takes on a quality of its own. It is hard to measure time, to establish chronology, if the dream work condenses events, or simply displaces them. In analyzing dreams you would try to reverse this condensation and displacement, and propose a sequence of occurrences or facts. Although you are not the patient, and the patient who tells her dream is awake. Your interpretation is belated, always; it is a story with the claim of truth.
Is this the only truth we have? And what should we do with such a discovery? But then, our time is up.