Malcolm Bowie – Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory
 
THE LETTER 01 (Summer 1994) pages 28-67
 
Excerpt:
 
The temporality of the human subject as studied by Freud suffers from an internal disproportion that has often been noted but seldom discussed: whereas he describes past time fondly and in detail, his account of future time is foreshortened and schematic. The present in which the analytic subject speaks is poised uneasily for Freud between discontinuous time-worlds. The problem lies not in the fact that past and future are logically asymmetrical, but in the seeming flatness that afflicts one of them: the past has character, but the future has none. Romancing the matter only a little, we could say that for Freud the past is ‘a character’, while the future is a cipher and something of a...