Potential Time: The Music of Potential Space
Love is not a symptom of time
Time is a symptom of love
Joanna Newsom, “Time, As A Symptom”
So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen.
David Lynch, Catching The Big Fish
Have you got a minute? Can I have a moment of your time? Well, yes, more than a moment. Do you happen to have some time? No, probably not, you don’t. After all, really — who does?
If you’re still with me though, you may be participating in an increasingly transgressive tradition of sustaining your attention beyond the now-normalized threshold that collapses experience into an instantaneous, almost timeless present, approaching no time at all. You are, in other words, already engaging in an act of temporal resistance, already playing with time in a way that psychoanalysis has long recognized as essential to its practice, even if it hasn't always known what to call this play.
It is perhaps no accident that psychoanalysis occupies this particular place in the economy of time and timelessness, given its fundamental engagement with the logic of the unconscious — a logic which, as Freud famously formulated, operates outside of time. While this timeless quality did not prevent Freud from developing his own understanding of a timeless logic, the very qualities that situate the unconscious beyond conscious reach — its resistance to linearity, its refusal of sequence — may also have made it more difficult to theorize psychical life in temporal terms. As a result, psychoanalytic theory has long favored spatial metaphors, mapping depth, domain, and boundary with far greater detail than the more elusive dimensions of time.
But questions of time have always been necessarily front and center in psychoanalytic practice, where theory meets the clock — where the abstractions of metapsychology are made flesh through the structure of the analytic hour. And now more than ever, psychoanalysts have become — perhaps more fundamentally than anything else — keepers of time, responsible for one of the few reliably held time-and-spaces left in contemporary life. This guardianship extends beyond the simple maintenance of schedules and boundaries — though these matter profoundly — to something more mysterious: the creation and protection of temporal conditions in which the psyche can unfold at its own pace, resting upon a shared rhythm. In an age that philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2017) has diagnosed as suffering from the "whizzing" of time, this protection becomes increasingly urgent, increasingly vital to the possibility of psychical life itself.
Tonight I will explore what I am calling potential time — a temporal companion to Winnicott’s seminal concept of potential space. Like its spatial counterpart, potential time is paradoxical: both objective and subjective, measured and unmeasured, structured and free-flowing. It is the time in which play becomes possible, in which creativity emerges, in which the true self can breathe. Before a patient can begin to live with the complexity of inner and outer life in time — before past, present, and future can be felt as continuous and layered (as opposed to collapsed and persecutory) — the analyst must hold and handle time, shaping it actively and cultivating a medium in which psychic movement becomes possible.
These conditions, like potential space, potentiate not only play and creativity within the sessions of analytic work, but the slower, more uncertain work of mourning over the course of analysis as a whole — the kind of process that cannot be predicted, rushed, or forced, but must be carried, accompanied, and borne together. Held securely open, potential time does not demand resolution, but sustains faith that something unexpected will always happen — that more world will emerge, even as we are always leaving behind the world as we knew it. In this sense, potential time shares its logic with music: an architecture-in-and-of-time that is open to the as-yet-unknown without collapsing into chaos, available for spontaneity without losing form.
Freud: Constancy and the Rhythms of Psychic Life
Now, there are of course infinite things to say (and that have been said, in psychoanalysis alone) about time, so I’m going to necessarily be highly selective and pick up only a few concepts, a handful of instruments, for us to think with together about time on this occasion.
Let’s start, as we often do, with just one idea from Freud, who beginning with the Project of 1895 but really ultimately in Beyond the Pleasure Principle makes his most explicit comments about what he called a principle of constancy.
The idea is that before there can be any pleasure or unpleasure, we need a perceptual system that regulates how excited or stimulated we get, so that we can remain open to the world while also protecting the psyche from overwhelm. (For those of you who were here for Mike’s talk last month, this is what he talked about in terms of “binding.”)
This principle of constancy underwrites the very possibility of psychic experience itself; it’s a reliable sameness that makes perception possible. In fact, Freud thought this was how perception worked at the physiological level – little “feelers” that sample the world, only a small fraction of which are ever psychically processed. And, crucial to our purposes, he described this sampling movement as a rhythm.
The rhythmic reliability of the perceptual system finds a clinical correlate through what we call the frame, which functions, first and foremost (or so we suggest in our book!), as a rhythm through which the psyche samples, binds, and only then makes sense of experience. Through its consistent timing, setting, and structured returns, the frame offers more than spatial containment: it creates a temporal structure that supports a rhythmic engagement with both internal and shared worlds.
Over the course of analytic work, this rhythm comes to shape consciousness itself, enchanting it with the subtle but steady lilt of meeting regularly. In what we have come to refer to as rhythmized consciousness, the usual ways of “keeping time” are, to some degree, suspended. In their place emerges a more associative mode of experience — less reactive, more embodied, more reflective, and more able to withstand uncertainty.
But this shift cannot be taken for granted; it depends profoundly on the analyst’s provision of a dependable tempo — one the patient can begin to internalize and feel, informing their own emergent responses. The analyst’s rhythmic reliability becomes a stable temporal background, a steady beat against which the patient can increasingly begin to improvise.
Although Freud never theorized this effect directly, he practiced it faithfully, as Winnicott would later observe (1954):
At a stated time daily, five or six times a week, Freud put himself at the service of the patient. (This time was arranged to suit the convenience of both the analyst and the patient.) … The analyst would be reliably there, in time, alive, breathing. …[and] on time…The analyst is not one who keeps patients waiting. (285)
Winnicott: The Frame of Potential
It was perhaps not Freud, of course, but Winnicott who gave us our most compelling theoretical model for understanding the conditions under which psychoanalytic process, which he thought of fundamentally as a form of play, became possible — conditions he famously called potential space. We can imagine that the temporal dimension of this space was likely once so woven into daily life that it needed little explanation. But in our current age of fragmented attention and accelerating time, the analyst's role as conductor of temporal experience takes on new urgency. The way time is (to paraphrase Winnicott) held, handled, and presented to the patient becomes increasingly crucial to the possibility of feeling alive in a human way. Perhaps the true potential of Winnicott's model has been waiting for a moment in which its temporal qualities demand explicit articulation; perhaps that time has arrived.
I imagine this audience is pretty familiar with Winnicott (maybe even more so than I am), so I just want to highlight, well, a sample of his comments about time.
So I’m gonna quickly mention three ideas:
Whole Experiences
In his paper “The Observation of Infants” (1941), Winnicott points to the therapeutic value when “the full course of an experience is allowed.” Now of course he knew that therapists couldn’t let sessions go on indefinitely (though he did experiment with that on occasion), so the analyst, he says, does “the next best thing”: she sets a fixed session length and reliably sticks to it, allowing patients to develop a sense of temporal security and rhythm. It’s a compromise, but one that retains fidelity to a deep sense of what the patient actually needs, even if we are inevitably unable to fully meet that need in any and every session.Waiting
So this is his famous idea of “x + y + z” in “The Location of Cultural Experience” (note the location) – and the idea is (long story short) that having to wait too long for a need to get met transforms ordinary waiting into trauma. He defines madness, in fact, as precisely a breakdown of “personal continuity of existence,” which happens when time feels unmanageable or endless. (And it’s just worth nothing that that he says this in a paper on being able to experience culture, which is what gives us temporal forms, or time, in the first place; we need culture to find the location, and also the rhythms, that enable us to experience the wider world of culture that my co-authors and I call the weave. More on that in a bit.)Paradox…Over Time
You probably know that in the preface of Playing and Reality, its opening gambit, Winnicott stakes his claim for a psychoanalytic paradox that “must be accepted and tolerated and respected, and for it not to be resolved.” What you may not have noticed is that in the “Tailpiece” (or Epilogue) to that same volume, he restates the same claim, but adds one phrase: he insists upon “a psychoanalytic paradox” that “must be accepted and tolerated and respected, and for it not to be resolved over a period of time.” So it’s almost like the whole work of the volume (which is the final volume he published during his lifetime) was to append the dimension of time to the paradox of potential.
Goldberg: Framing, Transitionality, Duration
So I’d like you to just hold those ideas in mind as we jump now from Winnicott to our very own Peter Goldberg, with whom many of you are already familiar and who you’ll get to hear from directly at the next one of these scientific meetings. But I want to grab a few of his ideas for our purposes tonight.
I believe Peter carries Winnicott’s sensibility into new territory, not by revising its premises, but by unfolding their implications with fresh attentiveness to the subtleties of lived experience in our day and age. Peter investigates not only what makes play possible, but what initiates or “induces” the psyche to move in and through time itself: how we shift from one state to another, and how such shifts can be sensed, supported, and sustained within the analytic relationship. In this sense, Peter doesn’t merely interpret Winnicott; he inhabits him, carrying his insights forward into the shared world where such transitions must be negotiated if they are to become livable.
So I want to mention now three of the most recent developments in Peter’s thinking:
1. framing
Peter picks up the thread from Freud and Winnicott concerning the conditions required for psychoanalytic process and transitional phenomena. But rather than treating the frame as a static container, he reanimates it as framing, a sustained process that foregrounds the analyst’s active involvement in cultivating not only understanding or meaning but sensation itself. Peter’s experiments with this inductive form of activity are experimental and varied — from the way he enters the waiting room to how he engages visually with objects in the office – but his point is unwavering: if the patient is not induced at the level of sensory communion, no analytic process can unfold.
2. transiting
For Peter, framing serves not only as a conduit for induction but also as what he calls a “transiting device [that] allows the analytic game to proceed.” This process involves not only the transitional phenomena described by Winnicott — where distinctions relax and paradoxes are allowed — but also the literal movement between psychic states, which Peter calls the transitive mode — essentially how we shift our attention from one thing to another.
Strictly speaking, transiting is a form of dissociation, a form that we all do, necessarily and repeatedly. The distinction between ordinary and pathological dissociation lies not in the act of severance itself, but in the flexibility of return. Only when time is rhythmically held — when we are in a groove — does time imbue consciousness with a felt sense of something substantial and sturdy, something we can “count on.” Rhythmized in this way, we become able not only to shift our attention, but to trust that what has been set aside — our unfinished thoughts, suspended feelings, latent desires — will be waiting for us, ready to resume when the time is right.
This is precisely why the collaborative negotiation of transitions in and out of each session — the anticipation of the waiting room, the beginning of the hour, the exchange within its bounds, the shared acknowledgment of its end — imbues psychoanalysis with transformative potential at the level of shared temporality. Each hour becomes an incubator for transit-work, a space-time where the forces involved in psychic movement — separation and return, severance and integration — can be sensed, supported, and gradually reconfigured.
3. duration
Peter attends not only to the moment-to-moment microactivity that accrues into the macrostructure of the frame, but also crucially to the question of duration, which he defines as “a temporal matrix in which some psychical work or lived experience can take place” (702). (So it’s a development of what Winnicott meant by “whole experience.”) By turning to the question of duration, Peter invites us to contemplate the generally undertheorized nature of the time analysis takes — what it is for, why it is necessary, and what happens during it. Of particular importance is the negotiation of time, the living tension through which the analyst and patient can find or create (or find-create) what he describes as a “personal way of being in the world” (699); “This, more than anything, I think” Goldberg continues, “is what analysis provides.”
Peter shows that the analyst’s facility with time is not only key to the basic conducting of daily practice (by the way: is there anything analysts do more reliably than begin and end sessions?) but also to the flexibility required to reach patients for whom time does not yet work — those whose rhythms must be met with sufficient readiness and availability to imagine a form of time that might.
[I’ll also just mention by way of contrast that many of Winnicott’s comments about time are about when to interpret, whereas Peter is attending as much — or more — to the urgent, ongoing, active sensing of time itself: to the question of whether time can be shared sensorially. If, as one of Winnicott’s patients famously observed, a “good analytic hour in which the right interpretation is given at the right time is a good feed” (1960b, 48), Peter’s extension might suggest that a good analytic session — one in which multiple temporalities, including the analyst’s, the world’s, and crucially, the patient’s personal time signature — form a good weave (as we call it), a dynamic integration of individual and collective registers that gives the session just enough structure for something to shift — not all at once, but in time. What emerges isn’t necessarily a breakthrough any given session, but an overall steadier footing, like finding the beat in a song, tempting the patient to dance.
Potential Time
Okay, putting Peter to the side, for a time — so what do I mean by potential time?
Well, much as Peter once appended beta-function as the logical supplement bridging Bion’s concepts of beta-elements and alpha-function, I thought I would take a stab at developing potential time not only out of a desire for theoretical symmetry (let alone a desire to be more like Peter), but as a necessary response to a moment in which time itself has become increasingly hostile to psychical life.
We believe that through the steady rhythm of the analytic frame, the immediate pressures of time begin to recede: the question of “what time is it?” begins to fade; the patient’s sense of responsibility to “keep time” relaxes. In this temporal harbour, time is no longer a demand on the mind — a demand for mind, in Winnicott’s (1949) sense — but a condition in which the psyche-soma can unfold relatively free of temporal preoccupation, irrigating new “passages” through time that feel driven by one’s own emergent becoming. Within what we call a “living frame,” a subjective sense of time feels potentially compatible with the time shared between patient and analyst and coordinated with the larger clocks and calendars that govern collective living.
Just as potential space rests on a paradox that must be held rather than resolved, perhaps potential time is defined by a paradox of its own. And so we might wonder: What question need we not ask in potential time?
I believe potential time depends on the analyst’s ability to sustain temporal openness without demand. Like the guardian of potential space — who keeps it free from imminent danger but not insulated from the world, charged at the sensory level but not overloaded — the analyst is responsible for maintaining the potentiality of time, at all times. In this temporal dimension, time “works” psychically because its rhythm is secure; its beat can be counted on enough to get lost in a groove.
Held within such rhythm, a distinctive temporal experience begins to emerge, one in which the question-that-need-not-be-asked is precisely the question of duration itself. (“What time is it? How long will this take?”) Only when these pressures recede can temporal registers come into enough of a transient, usable alignment for time to “work.” This provisional coordination of temporal orders is, in fact, precisely what potential time potentiates.
A young adult patient is contemplating whether she wants to increase the frequency of our sessions. She had scaled back our frequency a couple years earlier because she wanted more time to pursue other interests and experiences. This new cadence has been working well, but she is consistently distressed after interactions with her parents: When they dutifully express interest in how she is doing, they inevitably come up against their own empathic limits, which is upsetting to all three of them, though they pin it mostly on her. Perhaps, they suggest, she would like to increase her frequency with me?
One day I get an email from the patient which reads like an official communiqué, in a notably stilted tone — a request for an additional session that week, and to increase our frequency going forward. We do arrange to meet that week, but I do not have an ongoing hour available that fits her schedule. We resolve to muddle through until an hour becomes available, which happens some months later. When I offer it to her, she asks if she can think about it and email me later that day. I tell her she is welcome to email me but that we can also just continue talking about it the following week.
She begins the next session, after a pause, saying, “I know I need to let you know about the second hour.” Her “knowing” this is overdetermined, of course, but I register it as at least partially a reference to my admittedly neurotic tendency to have our schedule neat and tidy, which I have been trying to unclench through my own analysis and consultation. As we talk, her genuine ambivalence is difficult to reach under the pressure to make a decision. I say to her that it feels like the important thing is to take our time, and encourage her to keep thinking about it, but also to not keep thinking about it, so she can forget about it from time to time and see what her thought process seems like to her when she returns to it refreshed.
At the next session, the patient tells me with mild hesitation but with a strong sense of accomplishment that she does not want to add the second hour; she realized that she doesn’t want to go to therapy more often “to deal with [her] parents’ shit.” She expresses gratitude for not rushing her to answer and specifically for the suggestion to toggle between thinking and not-thinking about it.
This utterly ordinary illustration of how time is negotiated in analytic work underscores, in its very ordinariness, an essential paradox: in potential time, the freedom not to decide is a crucial precondition for sensing, and ultimately deciding, what one needs to do. By suspending the imperative toward immediate resolution, the analyst creates a temporal space where communication with oneself can unfold organically.
The freedom of potential time is the freedom of paradox, as Winnicott put it — not having to ask whether time is being subjectively contracted or objectively measured. Yet even this captures only one case of a more general feature, because I believe what is distinctive about potential time is not just that one need not be asked about time, but that no particular question need be asked (or not asked), answered (or not answered), at any particular time. This kind of openness, this analytic availability (Markman, 2017), makes time for another person, relieving the need to account for oneself at every moment — self-consciousness being, after all, kryptonite to the emergence of what Winnicott called true self — while remaining embedded in the various tempos we collectively rely upon to live our lives together.
To get a better feel for what I am describing, think of the last time you said (or the next time you say) to a patient, “Take your time.” What is that gesture, exactly? It has little informational content; the time is already theirs. Instead, it acts as a counterpressure — against a manic flurry of speech, or a paralyzing need to “optimize” every moment. Most crucially, I believe the analyst is communicating faith in a mode of time that is relatively free of pressure, rhythmically structured, and psychically generative. What’s offered is not just permission but accompaniment, the analyst playing host to collaborative experimentation in living, working, and playing in and with time.
Bearing Time Together
Potential time is thus marked not by productivity, but by openness — taut with the rhythmic discipline of a faithful framer, yet radically receptive to whatever may happen within it. This receptivity is not passive, and seldom easy; it often involves, in fact, a significant degree of patience. Patience is not a naturally occurring phenomenon for either “patient” or analyst; it is a psychological achievement that results from having developed a capacity to tolerate tension or discomfort (the word is rooted in pathos, which means to suffer; “duration” is from the Latin durus, which means hard).
To evoke the feeling of this form of labor, I want to return now to Peter, this time to a clinical vignette from his classic 1987 paper, “Actively Seeking The Holding Environment.”
The patient, a thirteen year old boy, from an economically disadvantaged area and a depriving family situation, very tall for his age and always wearing a baseball cap and a sarcastic smile, was brought into the psychotherapy clinic after becoming explosively angry and potentially violent on several occasions at school. After compliantly mumbling answers to my questions in the first couple of meetings, he fell completely silent. But for the exchange of pleasantries at the outset of a session, he would simply drape his long limbs comfortably over the arms of his chair, stare out of the window with the ever present smile, and say nothing at all. My most persistent efforts to win a response might at most produce a condescending glance and a grunt.
My difficulties were compounded by an extraordinarily powerful soporific quality that I experienced in the presence of this patient. Not simply the silence — for silence can be a fertile medium for reverie or can be charged with tension — but a stifling, languid heaviness in the atmosphere made it literally impossible to remain awake. I imagined that it was a matter of some amusement for him to watch me slipping unavoidably into a stupor.
Having exhausted my options, including vigorous interpretation of his behavior, educative comments, friendly conversation, and eventually veiled threats to terminate the sessions (which, incidentally, he attended regularly without coercion)...[my] decision was to attempt the telling of another story (I had already told stories with both education and friendly conversation in mind), but now I determined to do this without purpose or forethought — in essence, to allow myself to freely associate. The initial story that emerged took the following approximate form:
A wanderer, a guy who went from village to village, looking for a place to work and live, always very excited as he came over the hill and saw the village below in the valley, bustling with people going about their business. Eagerly he would make his way into town, but upon arriving there he would find everybody asleep, taking their siesta.
Variations on this tale followed, each story elaborating a little on the previous one. The patient remained steadfastly disinterested and unresponsive, but I continued telling stories because now, for the first time, I was alert and not troubled by sleepiness. After several sessions of this storytelling, answered only by increasingly frequent looks of disbelieving curiosity from the patient, the theme of my tale had developed to roughly this version:
He could pitch an excellent fast ball, and was going from one town to another looking for a ballclub who could use him. The managers were always impressed with his arm and wanted him to pitch on their ballclub. But the same thing happened each time: He'd get up on the mound, wind up to throw the first ball, and the batter would be passed out, asleep at the plate. Everyone would be asleep, and he'd have to move on to the next town.
It was during the relating of this particular version that the patient uttered his first protest: He declared my story "bullshit!" and set about analysing the shortcomings of the story both if it be taken as realistic and if it be treated as an allegorical tale. At first he was somewhat consternated at the possibility that I meant him to literally believe in the truth of the story, but soon he showed relief at realising that we could treat it as allegorical. Shortly he began telling me stories.
Peter’s spirited experimentation with technique exemplifies potential time’s central mechanism: the creation of a temporal space (a kind of “siesta”) in which conventional expectations are suspended and psychological movement becomes more fluid. What Peter demonstrates here is not simply interpretive ingenuity but temporal endurance — a capacity to generate movement on behalf of the dyad, with no clear endpoint in sight, and to do so for as long as it takes. This is the labor of sustaining potential time: not just making room for experience, but actively keeping that room open, inhabitable, and alive. The technical matter here is not merely one of withholding questions or interpretations; the analyst, too, must relinquish — à la Bion — the memory and desire that ordinarily differentiate now from then, urgent from idle, while still keeping an eye on the clock.
Like Peter’s young patient, who moves from mute resistance to creative engagement through the rhythm of shared storytelling — or like our earlier patient, who begins to discover and claim her own frame rhythm, rather than capitulating to external pressures — the ability to live in potential time becomes inseparable from the ability to feel like oneself.
(A Note on Mourning)
Creativity, in this sense, is not simply playful; it includes the capacity to bear what cannot be changed, to stay with what remains unresolved. To live creatively is also to live with loss — to carry it in time, to move with it rather than around it. In this way, potential time is essential to grief; it is what allows grief to become livable. We know grief takes time, and we never know how long it will take; this is precisely the kind of question that, in potential time, must not be asked. Indeed, it may be this very difficulty (as Harold Searles once suggested) — the unwillingness to let grief take time — that has precipitated the manic tempo of modern life (perhaps even the destruction of our planet). Cultural acceleration, in this light, can be seen not only as a technological development but as a defensive structure, a refusal to bear the slow work of grief.
Psychoanalysis becomes a temporal environment where loss can be held — sometimes metabolized into growth, other times simply borne, or ‘worn,’ as Sade once sang, “like a tattoo.”
Music as Potential Time
Music offers more than lyrical evocations of potential time, and it will provide a final touchstone for my meditations on potential time this evening. Like mourning, music moves through time while holding something still. It allows us to feel what has passed without letting it slip away, and to inhabit the present without demanding the future. It joins continuity and immediacy, wave and particle, creating a temporal atmosphere in which emotion can be carried, transformed, or simply held.
If, as Shakespeare suggested, music be the food of love; and if rhythm be, as Laplanche once put it, “the time of time,” then the lovelorn metabolics of that music which, like dreams, play with our sense of time itself may deserve special attention; music that, like some dreams, seems exquisitely good at organizing a personal sense of time, on terms that ordinary time rarely permits. Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” (2001) — written after the lead singer Thom Yorke visited an exhibit on ancient Egypt, a civilization obsessed with the afterlife, with eternity, with what time preserves — doesn’t just evoke the feeling of a dream; it moves like one. It bathes the listener in a temporality that feels unmeasured and strange, both intimate and untethered.
On first listen, the song’s rhythm seems to float outside of meter, creating a sense of temporal vertigo. But beneath the surface lies a precise pyramidal structure — two counts of three, one of four, then two more of three (3 + 3 + 4 + 3 + 3 = 16) — a subtle nod to standard 4/4 time, even as it transforms how that time is felt. Like potential time itself, it offers both containment and freedom, anchoring experience without fixing it…
[Play]
“Nothing to fear / and nothing to doubt.” The effect is one of admittedly therapeutic relief not only because of the song’s lyric, but because of its form: a novel rhythmizing of consciousness that allows past and future, presence and absence, love and loss, to accumulate and resonate. If potential space was Winnicott’s way of describing the psyche-soma’s need to be free of too much mind, music reveals the possibility of being freed from ‘time as a symptom’ — not because time disappears, but because we are no longer alone inside it.
I believe the analyst’s task, like the musician’s, is to create conditions in which this kind of temporal experience becomes possible — not simply to analyze content, but to conduct form. Beginning with a point of Freud’s, spatialized by Winnicott, and further dimensionalized through Peter’s elaborations, potential time becomes a pyramid song that houses the potential to bear the loss of time together, releasing us toward the future. Perhaps loss is always really a loss of time; not just the clock ticking away, but a time-trauma, a needle scratch, a WiFi signal dropped in the stream of going-on-being. To get the groove going again requires a signature form, a provision and protection of a deeply material, musical way of living, to be found and created anew in every analysis, at every concert, in every collective ritual and cultural form, beckoning those frozen out of time to find their way back in — to jump in its river, and sing of what they see.