The Importance of Discontinuity: Palpations, Feelers and Quanta

Abstract

Chapter 4 suggests that we can infer from Freud’s hints a developmental model showing the acquisition of time from an initial state of timelessness. The author establishes Freud’s account of our adaptation to the external world, one which enables a move away from pleasure principle functioning, where we hallucinate what we desire, to secondary process functioning which inserts a delay in the system so that reality testing can take place. Reality testing allows us to distinguish between a perception and an idea. The process has a discontinuous mode of operation, one which Freud places at the centre of the development of our idea of time. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Freud’s suggestion that time itself is nothing more—or less—than the projection into the external world of our perception of this discontinuity. ‘[The] discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time’. (Freud 1925b, p. 231)