Antonia Meltzoff was a therapist and gifted writer who died a year ago. She wrote this article many years ago, but it stands the test of time.
We mark our moments with clocks, dates, and calendars. We try to fix our experiences in time and memory. But time has a way of eroding, distorting, and certainly of transforming experience, especially the memory of experience. Some people jokingly call the recollection of the past revisionist history. Memoirists will tell you of the moment when their lives seemed to become fictive. Memories fade, blur, refocus with a jolt, even reoccur in dreams. We think about our memories, for in a deep sense, they are we.
We take a history from our patients – time lines from the past. Many of us working in hospitals and clinics and filling out insurance forms are asked if the patient is oriented in time, place, and person (oriented x 3). It’s significant that we place our first priority upon orientation in time. Perhaps this orientation is the anchor in a sea of time, and we hold fast to it above all else. Some of us just look at observable behavior or reported feelings rather than a history.
Some of us take a family history and make a genogram. We all look and listen. Some of us hear a story, a narrative, a number of themes we associate to other bits of knowing. All of us struggle to know each other. Whatever our theoretical orientation most of us take some kind of history. It orients and directs us. Even psychologists who are primarily focused on a person’s contemporary behavioral problems need to take at least a cursory history so as to place the behavior in the context of time. Each individual we meet tries to recapture time past through some narrative telling. Our experience, as practitioners, also occurs over time, and our own memories reverberate (counter transference) as we listen to the narrative arc. Years ago at a V.A. Clinic I asked veterans to summon memories of their parents’ disciplinary styles. “Well, how do we know if it’s true?”, someone asked me. “It’s all that’s left,” I replied. I then asked the veterans to describe how they themselves disciplined their own children, and, indeed, there was a resemblance between their memories of their parents and their own reported behaviors. It was all that was left, literally.
And the clock stands guard. We sprinkle clocks judiciously about our offices in strategic spots so that we and our clients can meter our time together. My experience of time varies enormously throughout the day. There are times when the hour speeds up and I experience every moment with such intensity that the time passes in a flash. I barely feel the time pass, so immersed am I in the moment.
There are occasions when time slows to allow for the full import and gravity of what is being discussed to be absorbed. Somehow the hour seems elastic enough to fit in the extent of what needs to be said. There are other times when time slows because I cannot maintain my connection and I’m bored or adrift. These subjective experiences of time are common to us all.
They are really quite similar to an athlete’s experience of time. There have been many studies about athletes’ experiences of time as they engage fully in their sport. Baseball players talk about how time slows so much that they can see the stitches on the ball as it whizzes toward them, the skater feels her triple lutzes in slow motion, thus enabling her to maneuver with ease, and the high diver finds he can perform best when time slows down for him. It seems that many high-performing athletes experience a slowing of time in their most intense moments. Clearly our experience of time is entirely subjective, although our knowledge of its finite qualities belies our senses.
Of course, the structuring of time creates its own exigencies, and practitioners arrange their work accordingly. Therapists measure time in complex ways. In fact, the whole enterprise of deciding how long an encounter should be with a patient seems quite arbitrary. Some see patients for an hour, a euphemism for 45, 50 or 60 minutes. Then there are those therapists who work in half-hour modules, feeling that the kind of work they do is best served in that amount of time. Of course, the obverse is also true, that there are those who expand their time to one and a half and even two-hour stretches. The notion of the hour was probably born, however, because it seemed the optimal time in which intimate exchanges might occur naturally. It must have seemed like an optimal time for people who might be anxious, traumatized, fearful or even merely curious to settle down, to try to find words, words to express why they are sitting there with you. Much more time than an hour might feel burdensome, even, perhaps, an over-commitment of time.
Each of our patients responds differently to the strictures of the hour we impose upon our encounters. And, of course, patients’ responses to the hour vary with their needs of the moment. It is always important to have clocks visible to both patient and therapist. However, the idea that the therapist might glance at the clock prematurely can be perceived as painful to a vulnerable person. Judicious monitoring of time can be difficult, given the aforementioned elasticity of time and our subjective experience of it.
Clearly time and our patient’s perception of it becomes a transference issue just as it is an issue for us as therapists. Some clients never feel that the hour is enough time for their needs. Some feel that the experience of therapy is so painful that their feet tap a dance in their desire to carry them out of the room sooner than the hour ends. Others feel that my clocks are always wrong. Of course this is true when they’re not synchronized properly. I finally bought a radio-controlled clock.
Frequently, if we’ve worked in this field for a while, we can have the distinct honor of knowing a patient or a family over a long period of time – even generations of time. I might have completed the therapy with an 18 year old, and then lo and behold, 10 years later, she calls me to resolve or at least discuss another difficult passage. And so I’ve come to experience the lives of numerous patients over various stages of their development. I’ve had the pleasure of working with adolescents I once knew as babies when I met their parents in couples work. This experience of people over time is deeply moving and rewarding…humbling, really.
Consider these well-worn epithets…. Time is of the essence, Time waits for no man, Time flies when you’re having fun, Time creeps by at this petty pace from day to day (Shakespeare’s Hamlet), Times marches on, Tempus fugit, Time and tide wait for no man, Seize the day…. The list is endless, but I’ve chosen these particular ones because they seem most relevant. It gives one pause to rediscover these sayings as they bloom on the page.
I’ve wondered what life must have been like before the invention of the pocket watch and the wrist watch. People no doubt had a looser affiliation to the literal minutes of the day. They were guided by factors such as the length of the day, the fall of night and the position of the sun in the sky, among other things. They were regulated far lass rigidly than we in this respect. The effect on the quality of life in our time-bound society can only be surmised. I suspect it has added incalculably to our level of stress, in addition to other aspects of our mental health.
The twirling ballerina fixes her gaze and the room stands still. This metaphor applies to our work. Life rushes on, but if we attend, focus, pause, create the time and space for connection to others the world opens for us all.