at the still point of the turning world’: a journey through the temporal dimensions of a...

‘At the still point of the turning world’: a journeythrough the temporal dimensions of a father–sonconflict

Ellen Katza

Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

This paper will examine aspects of the permeability of time, with a view toexploring our perceptions of ourselves as present-focused distinct individ-uals. Permeability of time is defined as time’s fluidity, its ability to moveacross boundaries of past, present and future. Fluidity, in this sense, is ourcapacity to experience past, present and future simultaneously.

Time will be examined from both psychoanalytic and systemic view-points. Issues of time and timelessness, consciousness and memory will beraised and the usefulness of working from an affective base discussed. Thecase cited in the paper is one in which the family was in the stage of havingan adolescent child. Adolescence will therefore be discussed as it relates tothe issue of time. The clinical discussion will be based on an integration ofthe two theoretical perspectives as they relate to time and affect. In conclu-sion I will revisit the question of our perception of ourselves as present-focused distinct individuals within a family context.

Time: a psychoanalytic and systemic examination

Paradoxical thought, memory, consciousness and time

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the paradoxical concepts oftime/timelessness and consciousness/unconsciousness arediscussed by Hartocollis (1974, 1983), Matte-Blanco (1988), Raynerand Tuckett (1988), Jordan (1990), Ogden (1992a, 1992b), andMuir (1995). Inherent tensions exist within these paradoxical

2002 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice

The Association for Family Therapy 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.Journal of Family Therapy (2002) 24: 369–3840163–4445

a Senior Clinician, Hincks-Dellcrest Centre, 440 Jarvis Street, Toronto, Ontario,M4Y 2H4, Canada.

concepts. They are paradoxical in the sense that they describe aprocess in which creation and negation occur simulaneously withincontinual movement between the contradictions of time and time-lessness, and consciousness and unconsciousness (Ogden, 1992a,1992b). These processes coexist in a dialectical relationship due tothe workings of the mind. According to Matte-Blanco (1988), thehuman mind is divided into five strata that encompass both theconscious and unconscious mind, and because the human mindcan only consider spaces of three dimensions, time is collapsed.This occurs because our mind, in grouping likeminded objects andevents together does not take time into account, and hence it iscollapsed. Likeminded objects and events will be classified into thesame set regardless of the time in which they occurred. The mind,then, due to its ability to perceive maximally in three dimensions, isoften obliged to eliminate the sense of time. Matte-Blanco views theunconscious tendency to fuse experience as more powerful thanthe mind’s ability to maintain separateness.

A brief look at memory further elucidates the discussion of time.Tulving (1985), a psychologist, defines memory as ‘the capacity thatpermits organisms to benefit from their past experiences’. There areat least three different memory systems – procedural, semantic andepisodic – arranged in a hierarchy from less to more complex.Memory systems appear to be oriented separately to the future(procedural memory), the present (semantic memory) and the past(episodic memory). Each system possesses a different form ofconsciousness. The episodic and procedural systems are pertinent tothis discussion. Procedural memory (future time) possesses anoeticor non-knowing consciousness. Episodic memory (past time) is auto-noetic or self-knowing. Episodic memories are supported by theprocedural memory system, and it is only the latter that can operateindependently of the others. Awareness of time is therefore a func-tion of self-knowledge. Time rests within the self.

Jeffrey Prager (1998), a sociologist and analyst who straddlesboth psychoanalysis and systemic thinking, also views memory asbeing related to self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, embodied inepisodic memory, is critical to situating oneself temporally but itslocation in the later developing memory system renders it vulnera-ble. Its vulnerability lies, as Tulving argues, in self-knowledge orautonoetic consciousness being the least necessary form ofconsciousness (Tulving, 1985). It is the sense of time that seemsmost fragile and easily lost.

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Communication and time

Etchegoyen and Ahumada (1990) discuss the links between thepsychoanalytic thoughts of Matte-Blanco and the systemic thinkingof Bateson. Bateson’s work shows the existence of two modes ofcommunication: analogic and digital. Analogic communicationinvolves patterns of actions in relationships and is based on classesof relationships. As such it encompasses the nonverbal, emotionalcomponent of a relationship. Digital communication, in contrast, isspecific, word-based communication in which the external worldmay be divided up into specific objects. Etchegoyen and Ahumadastate, ‘Recognition of individuals (including the speaker) as such,that is, as distinct from the class, requires quite an advanced degreeof digitalization.’ Bateson’s systemic thinking supports Matte-Blanco’s psychoanalytic argument: the mind merges distinct expe-rience into sets of similar experiences.

Paul Gibney (1994), a systemic therapist, further develops theimportance of distinguishing between digital and analogic commu-nication. As digital communication pertains to language and signsit can be negated, whereas analogic communication, the nonverbalrealm, cannot: ‘Simply put, you can tell someone that you did notmean what you said, but once you have hit them, they remain hit!’Gibney castigates family therapy for relying on digital communica-tion to facilitate the negation of the past. Family therapy viewsprevious experience as subject to negation if placed in a differentstory. Gibney recommends the inclusion of both time and affect intherapy. He argues that the past, encoded in analogic memories,cannot be negated. What is needed is an emphasis on the analogiccomponents of relationships. When clients feel supported in a ther-apeutic environment, they can experience emotions that may nothave been available to them in previous stressful situations. Suchexperience allows affect to become encoded as episodic memory as‘opposed to an on-going emotional organising principle in theclient’s life’.

In discussing time the systemic literature reveals a focus on largersystems, encompassing sociocultural time issues. Such issues pertainto the increased use of technology and its impact on family time.Mention is made of paradoxical concepts of subjective and objectivetime (Ritterman, 1995), and mind and body time (Ventura, 1995).However, there is little examination of the incongruity oftime/timelessness. Boscolo and Bertrando (1993), Larner (1998)

‘At the still point of the turning world’ 371


and Madigan (1997) adopt constructivist positions in their exami-nation of time. Here, time is a construction of an external realitynot an acquisition of such a reality. Time is seen as a representationof relationships rather than an external reality.

Boscolo and Bertrando (1993) and Larner (1998) discuss the selfas an amalgamation of past, present and future experience andinteraction. The individual exists within a whole range of differenttemporal horizons, though he or she may be able to give consciousattention to only one of them at a time. Prager (1998) echoes thisin saying that the self ‘is driven by internal pressures to rememberthe past in the idiosyncratic ways that are required for one to situ-ate oneself temporally in a past, a present and a future’. The poten-tial is there for the same blurring of boundaries discussed in thepsychoanalytic literature. Because the individual exists simultane-ously in different temporal horizons, the past is continually rede-fined by present events and relationships. The past, therefore, isconstantly re-created in the present and can never be re-created asit actually was. This implies that the past may be modified througha different re-creation in the present.

Larner’s emphasis is different in his examination of therapeuticchange as it relates to time. His discussion of time from a construc-tivist perspective touches on time as a ‘unity’. He mentions the past‘not as lost in time but as something we can never leave behind’,and he agrees with Gibney in describing therapeutic time as havinga timeless quality. However, he makes no mention of affect in timein his discussion.

Prager’s (1998) view that what is remembered from the past isdesigned to serve the self’s affective needs underscores Gibney’semphasis on the primacy of affect. Prager sees affect as structuringmemory. His view is that feeling states and bodily desires inheritedfrom the past but prevailing in the present are able to ‘rewrite thepast in search of the present’. Working from an affective base couldbe useful in working through these affective memories in order tointegrate them better into one’s overall life narrative or episodicmemory.

Within the more recent family therapy literature a debate hasarisen about the lack of discussion of affect and the use ofemotion in clinical work. Flaskas (1989, 1990, 1993) has writtenextensively in this area and highlights the recent shift in familytherapy to a greater acceptance of analytic ideas in general andthe use of affect in particular. The Journal of Systemic Therapies

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(1998) devoted a whole issue to the use of emotion in couples andfamily therapy. The editorial written by Susan Johnson (1998)acknowledged that systemic therapies have been accused ofneglecting the emotional sphere. In addition, King (1998),McFadyen (1997), Turnell and Lipchik (1999) and Pocock (1997)have stated similar views, noting an absence of a discussion ofaffect. Mellor et al. (2000) note that ‘information gained throughthe observation of non-verbal patterns has been ignored and awhole body of knowledge neglected.’ These authors all support ashift to a greater use of affect in family therapy, and King (1998)suggests concrete ways of integrating affect and emotion in solu-tion-focused therapy. In fact, Mellor et al. (2000) caution againstmoving too far away from ‘the real core of human life, the feelingdomain’. Johnson’s editorial (1998) stated that the aim of thisedition of the Journal of Systemic Therapies devoted to the issue ofemotion in clinical work was to ‘integrate emotion into systemicthought and practice, adding a new and vital piece to the systemicpicture’.

Systemic and psychoanalytic views of time are complementaryand facilitate a richer understanding of the concept of time. Thelack of consideration from a systemic perspective fosters a greaterreliance on the psychoanalytic perspective which is rich in thisarea. Etchegoyen and Ahumada, and Gibney discuss communica-tion and memory in a way that illuminates the mechanisms used bythe mind in merging distinct experiences into sets of similar expe-rience as discussed by Bateson and Matte-Blanco. Gibney andMatte-Blanco demonstrate the power that procedural memory andanalogic communication have to stimulate the mind to organizeexperience into sets of events. Prager discusses affect as an organ-izing principle of time as it is remembered. Flaskas, King, Turnelland Lipchik, Pocock, McFadyen and Mellor, Storrer and Firth allsupport the use of affect in clinical work. The emphasis is on themind’s need to re-create the same affective experience until it isable to remember and process those emotions in order to integratethe affective component of the experience into episodic memorywhere it may exert less power over the individual. Larner’s (2000)view is that repetition over time is of interest both in psychoanaly-sis and family therapy. ‘The idea of repetition finds expression interms of unconscious patterns of individual psychology, systemicsequences in families and in the coherent recounting of life expe-riences as narrative.’



Adolescence as it relates to time

Adolescence has been defined as ‘the transitional period betweenpuberty and adulthood in human development extending mainlyover the teen years and terminating legally when the age of major-ity is reached’ (Stein, 1973).

Blos (1962,1967) and Lidz (1983), writing about adolescencefrom a psychodynamic perspective, agree on the intrapsychic statesunderlying individuation. Lidz (1983) says that adolescence is theproper time to be both dependent and independent. He mentionsthe paradoxical situation of preparing for self-sufficiency while gain-ing support, protection and guidance from parents. Blos (1967) says,‘The adolescent process constitutes, in essence, a dialectical tensionbetween primitivization and differentiation, between regressive andprogressive positions, each drawing its impetus from the other, aswell as each rendering the other workable and feasible.’ Paradoxand dialectical tension has been further explored in a discussion ofthe permeability of time. Nowhere is the dialectical tension betweenseparateness (autonomy) and connectedness more poignantly expe-rienced than in the adolescent’s individuation.

Carter and McGoldrick (1989) have written about families attimes of change, and Preto (1989) has written about adolescence,both from a systemic viewpoint. They discuss the flow of anxiety ina family as being both vertical (a timeline that includes successivegenerations), and horizontal (a timeline that encompasses onegeneration as it moves forward through time). It is the degree ofadaptive response to the anxiety engendered by the stress on thevertical and horizontal axes at the points where they converge thatis the key determinant of how well the family will manage its transi-tions through life. Preto further defines the convergence of thevertical and horizontal axes. The axes intersect when (on the verti-cal axis) an unresolved conflict between parents and grandparentsis reactivated as the adolescent (on the horizontal axis) is attempt-ing to move beyond the exclusive influence of his family. Thisdiscussion raises the theoretical issue of time, as discussed above.

Understanding the intervening with the M. family

Assessment

The M. family consists of a 17-year-old son Fred, and parents Sandraand Kurt. Before the referral, the family had made a number of

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attempts to improve family relationships. Parent counselling haduncovered difficulties in the father–son relationship. Attempts toameliorate the difficulties were unsuccessful. Although Kurt, thefather, could make a shift on an intellectual level, it was much moredifficult for him to do this on an emotional level. Sandra, Kurt andFred had all been involved in individual therapy. While bothparents had had rewarding experiences, Fred was found to beunsuited to individual psychotherapy by the therapist who had seenhim for an assessment. Sandra and Kurt then contacted the out-patient department of the children’s mental health centre in theirarea in order to initiate family therapy. In their search for profes-sional help for their son, they realized that they had never triedfamily therapy. They came to the present assessment wanting toknow whether family therapy was suited to their situation andwhether it could assist them in reducing tensions and distance inthe family, and increasing their abilities to positively relate to eachother, fostering closer relationships among them.

The presenting problem was seen from two perspectives. Fredsaw the problem as dating back to the beginning of high schoolwhen school work was more difficult and he became mixed up witha peer group involved in drugs and theft. He missed class regularlyand failed a number of courses. Although the family maintainedthat Fred had a learning disorder, contact with psychoeducationalstaff at his school called this into question. Kurt’s view of the situa-tion was that it dated back to Fred’s childhood. Fred had always gotinto conflicts around rules. Kurt saw his son as an obstinate person,responsible for the conflict. Father–son struggles as a result ofKurt’s attempts to establish rules had been mediated by Sandra.Sandra’s view was that her husband’s expectations of Fred wereunrealistic based on his own (Kurt) past. Sandra saw Kurt as need-ing to make some changes in his interactions with Fred. Fred’sdevelopment was reported as delayed by his parents. They spoke ofhim as always slow and somewhat obstinate. He had lied frequentlyfor self-aggrandizing purposes. At age 15 he began breaking rules,fighting and taking drugs. He became involved in car thefts andbicycle stealing. Fred ran away for a few nights, though he let hisparents know his whereabouts.

Family history revealed difficult childhoods for the twoparents. Kurt came from a working-class background. He experi-enced his own father as rejecting him, as he thought that Kurtwould not be successful in life. Kurt described himself as having



learning difficulties. He left home with relief as his parents arguedfrequently. He obtained a Ph.D. in one of the social sciences withgreat determination, after having dropped out of high school. Kurthad recently completed his first book. He had a brother ten yearsyounger with whom he had had no recent contact.

Sandra’s father died when she was 15. Her mother had a majormental illness and Sandra became the caretaker of her two siblings,an older sister and a younger brother. She therefore found it diffi-cult to leave home and was surprised at how attached she was to hermother. Sandra acquired a Master’s Degree in education andcontemplated going back for a Ph.D. but decided against it. BothSandra and Kurt work in education; Kurt as a university professor,and Sandra as a high school teacher.

Observing family functioning yielded the following pattern. Kurt(father) attacked Fred (son) for disobeying family rules, usingdemeaning language. Sandra (mother) rose to Fred’s defence withthe stated goal that Kurt modify his position. Kurt did so but thenattacked Sandra for her defence of Fred. Sandra responded byabandoning Fred and siding with Kurt. Kurt may have modified hisinitial position but he felt put out and blamed by the rest of thefamily. Fred was left wanting to improve his relationship with hisfather but feeling shut out.

Therapy

The family was eager for therapy. They presented as wanting todiscuss the blocks between them, their goal being closer emotionalrelationships. Kurt initiated and found the use of metaphors help-ful and in particular favoured the use of a ‘wall’ between himselfand Sandra, and a ‘block’ between himself and Fred. Kurt expresslydescribed time as a factor in the family’s difficulties. He founddiscussing the ‘archaeology of the block’ useful, but was nervousabout being seen as ‘the problem’. He said that the family viewedhim as the problem because he exploded in anger during argu-ments with his son. Kurt felt that Fred was the problem. Kurt hadhad such a traumatic childhood that he had worked hard at becom-ing the kind of father he never had, and he felt that he hadsucceeded in this task. Kurt began to acknowledge the potentialmutuality of the problem when I introduced another way ofcommunicating, ‘standing in each other’s shoes’. This was used tofacilitate father–son communication. Kurt felt that this would aid in

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Fred hearing his voice. While this was successful, it also facilitatedKurt hearing his son. Kurt began to modify his side of the difficulty,referring to this process as ‘excavating the block’.

My presence as therapist seemed important to this family. Freddeveloped the metaphor ‘tuning you in’ which meant that thefamily would ‘tune me in’ as they would a television channel to seewhat I would say. Numerous references were made to having donethat in between sessions. They would then tell me what I would say.They were always ‘correct’ in that they knew exactly what I wouldhave said, and would acknowledge when they could have inter-preted family events differently.

Fred and Kurt each came to a crucial point in therapy. For Fredthis occurred early. I defended Fred in a family session because hisfather’s expectations of Fred appeared unreasonable. I told Kurtthat his own behaviour had been unreasonable. The family said Ihad put Kurt ‘in the hot seat’. In the next session the family saidthat Fred had raised this for discussion in between sessions, feelinghis father had been treated unfairly. He then went on to graduallybecome less unnecessarily provocative with his father but he wasable to continue to state his view when it differed from that of thisfather.

In his use of time to conceptualize family problems, Kurt’s signif-icant moment in therapy was more gradual, comprising many smallmoments. The first of the small moments in Kurt’s shifts beganwhen, in one session, Kurt said with great feeling, ‘The past is verymuch alive for me.’ He went on to describe the degradation he expe-rienced in his family of origin. Kurt detailed his father’s constantdemeaning comments to him. His father did not expect him tosucceed in life and when Kurt was successful, his father did notrespond to him. Kurt’s mother sided with his father, but was lessovertly cruel to Kurt. Kurt protected his brother Jeff from hisparents’ anger. He cited an example of assisting his brother inmaking excuses for an exam he missed. He wanted his brother as anally, but Jeff was never an ally for Kurt and, when they were adults,resented Kurt’s university degrees. Kurt gave up the attempt to forgea relationship with his brother, severing all contact with him. It waspossible to sense Kurt’s return to the affective past in this discussion,as in other discussions of the past. When he finished what he wantedto say, it was as if he had returned from another world.

Another of the small moments assisting Kurt’s shifts occurred inanother session. Kurt and Fred were squabbling. Sandra



commented that this did not seem to be a parent–child conflict asshe experienced it as a sibling conflict. The temporal dimension ofthe problem was present when I asked who the siblings were. Kurtacknowledged that he was not really speaking to Fred in this conver-sation but to his brother, and they were competing for his mother’s(in this case Sandra) attention. He explained that there were othertimes when he and Fred spoke when he felt he was ‘really’ talkingto his father. Kurt acknowledged that his past was still alive in hisrelationship with his son. I attempted to explore the affective expe-rience evoked in these present confrontations with the past. I askedKurt if his thinking was that his father was still alive for him. Kurthad difficulty engaging in this exploration. I will discuss Kurt’s diffi-culty further in the next section.

A similar difficulty emerged early in treatment when I proposed,in a father–son session, the use of family sculpture. Sculpting is atechnique used to prompt affective experience and its exploration(McWhinney and Finlayson, 1974; Jefferson, 1978). It can be usedwhen affect seems to be a difficult area for the family. Father andson had great difficulty in engaging in this affective experience.They were accustomed to using words and had difficulty engagingin a technique that brought the affect alive. It could be that such atechnique may have been too threatening for them. Unfortunatelytheir discomfort in working directly with the affect evoked in thesession limited the potential for addressing the family’s difficulties.Again I will discuss this in greater detail in the next section.

Towards the end of therapy, Kurt and Fred seemed to be connect-ing in a more positive way. Marital tension, which initially seemedhigh, then subsided after a number of couple sessions. Sandra andKurt used these sessions to explore and come to terms with theirdifferences. As father–son tension was reduced, marital tensiononce again began to rise. The case was transferred to another clini-cian when my time at the agency ended. As was later reported to meby my colleague who continued the work, there were no significantshifts in the family and they made a decision to end the therapy.

Integrating theory as a base for understanding intervention

Theories of time provide a rich and complex understanding of thisfamily’s temporal perspective. As a central figure in this family, onecould argue that Kurt could be located ‘at the still point of theturning world’. He is the pivotal point between an unresolved past

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relationship and a present relationship which has the potential ofduplicating the one in the past. Kurt had a grasp of the differingtemporal components of the family’s dilemma. This was gainedthrough extensive individual therapy, parent counselling and feed-back he received about the course of Fred’s individual therapy.Kurt’s understanding was essentially a cognitive-behavioural under-standing and was one of the reasons the affective work was unsuc-cessful. He could speak eloquently about the issues but was difficultto engage affectively. He could affectively experience his childhoodanger at having been negated by his father but was less able to expe-rience other emotions. He was also unable to integrate the differingtemporal experiences: that of his family of origin and that of hisfamily of marriage. We hypothesize this as occurring due to the wayKurt’s memory and affect systems appeared to operate.

Kurt’s memory system seemed procedurally (future) dominated.His automatic procedurally dominated relational functioning wasrife with the affective and sensorimotor experiences of traumaticchildhood negation by his father. To put it another way, the futurewas dominated by the past. His episodic (past) memory systemstored vast numbers of these events. Episodic (past) memories wereexperienced as so traumatic for Kurt that he was unable to affec-tively experience the present moment as it occurred. (It seemedthat surviving these re-evoked past traumatic experiences was mostimportant to Kurt in the present.) What may have occurred is thatthe affective elements of these experiences were suppressed therebyleaving a cognitive awareness as a cover. Removing the cognitivedefence would bare the frightening affective experience and Kurtmay have tried to prevent this. However, because he was not able tointegrate procedural and episodic memories, these affective experi-ences continued to organize his experience. Consciously Kurt hadcognitively understood his past and was determined to overcome it,but because he had not affectively experienced it, it was uncon-sciously still operative. Although ostensibly living in the present,Kurt was also living in the past, experiencing simultaneously timeand timelessness. His unconscious anxiety to resolve a traumaticpast continued to create the same conditions. Kurt transformedFred into a cast of characters from his past, blurring present distinc-tions between the two of them. Fred could be himself as a child, hisfather as a child, or his brother as a child. This had continued asKurt was unable to experience his past affectively. His wife and soncould have been organized in Kurt’s unconscious in a set including



family – past and present. Kurt constructed bigger blocks betweenhimself and his son and bigger walls between himself and his wife.Yet, as in the transformation of Fred into other family members,Kurt had also destroyed any distinctions between his wife and sonand himself and became fused with them in the present. Thoughthey could not process the affect evoked, communication amongthem was primarily analogic in the importance of emotions, andlacked the digital component of separateness.

This situation was intensified as Fred entered late adolescence. Ata time when he should have been leaving the family, he was unableto do so. Increased tension on the family’s horizontal axis of timereactivated past vertical time axis conflicts. Kurt did not want to lethim go until he had resolved his own past relationships. Because hewas not able to do this, Kurt would unconsciously not allow his sonto psychologically leave.

A variety of techniques, grounded affectively, proved to be help-ful to this family in treatment. The use of metaphors, introduced bythe family, pointed to Kurt’s unconscious need to access his proce-dural memory. Metaphors, such as ‘wall’, ‘block’, ‘standing in eachother’s shoes’ and ‘tuning me in’ all evoked affective and sensori-motor experience in a manner different from that of ordinaryconversation. Sculpting also attempted to evoke such experience,albeit less successfully. Perhaps delaying this method until later intreatment, when the family was more comfortable on an affectivelevel, would have increased its success.

Upon termination, I remained in the position of having beenunable to facilitate an affective encounter between Kurt and hispast. Family conditions had improved in a greater cognitive under-standing for Sandra, Kurt and Fred of general family tensions, ofwhat triggered escalations of tensions and how to reduce thosetensions when they occurred. However, a lasting improvementwould be more likely to arise when Kurt could affectively engagewith his past. This would involve encounters with emotions otherthan anger, perhaps emotions of fear, sadness and disappointment.Then procedural and episodic memories could be integrated.Should Kurt’s memory be integrated, he would overcome the needto continually re-create the past in the present and be able to affec-tively experience his past relationship with his father. He would alsobe able to reintegrate this relationship into a reconstructed past.Kurt could then experience his son for the person he really was, anadolescent who desired an adult relationship with his father. In

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resolving the past he could truly live in the present and forge anintact future.

Conclusion: psychoanalytic and systemic time integrated

This paper has focused on understanding a clinical case from thetemporal difficulties explicitly experienced by the family. The psycho-analytic literature focused on time from the viewpoint of the indivisi-bility or unity of time, paradoxical thinking and its inherent tensions.The systemic literature’s focus was on time as the internalization ofrelationships and the self as having the ability to co-exist within differ-ent temporal horizons. In this literature, family therapy makes a pleafor the use of affect in working with the experience. The psychologi-cal literature demonstrates the primacy of affect in its location in theprocedural memory system, the earliest human memory system.These complementary bodies of literature are invaluable in under-standing the concept of time, both theoretically and clinically aspresented in the case example. All contribute to the need to includeworking from an affective base as integral to intervention.

In the course of this paper, I have illustrated the continuous oscil-lations or dialectics on a continuum in the following processes:time/timelessness, conscious/unconscious and subject/object. Ihave suggested that our perceived hold on a continuous, present-focused distinct individual is much more tenuous than we think itto be. I have illustrated the theoretical with a clinical case demon-strating the individual’s inextricable place within the family, be itpast, present and/or future. The unconscious mind may be seen tohave a need to continually re-create the past in the present until itis affectively resolved, if ever, which suggests that the way to attemptresolution of the past is through work on an affective level. Time isindeed fluid as the human mind constantly flits among the past,present and future in an attempt to resolve the passage of time. Thepast is never truly laid to rest. It is either more or less of an influ-ence in the present and future.

The two disciplines emphasize different aspects of the concept oftime. In addition, until recently, psychoanalytic and systemic think-ing have emphasized different aspects of the therapy process.Psychoanalysis stressed the need to understand the client.Understanding the individual was the emphasis. Systemic therapiesplaced more emphasis on pattern and therapist role with the family,as the unit discussed. There seem to have been different opinions



both on the place of paradox and dialectical thinking.Psychoanalysis and family systems therapies have each encompassedbelievers and non-believers. The inherent paradox persisted.However, some of the recent shifts detailed in this paper have high-lighted a greater degree of commonality in these two forms of ther-apy. This has strengthened and enriched the discussion. Inaddition, both disciplines are moving towards a focus of under-standing the individual within a family context.

The complementarity of psychoanalytic and systemic perspectiveshas been valuable in viewing how the individual lives within thefamilial context. Grasping the realities of both the individual innerworld and the familial outer world is critical, ‘for it is only againstthe background of the mind’s private space that the real otherstands out in relief’ (Benjamin, 1988).

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge my appreciation to the late Roy Muir whointroduced me to the fundamental antinomy of being and whosupported me in seeking out the resulting inherent contradictions.I also wish to acknowledge my appreciation to Eric King who shep-herded the initial writing of this paper, providing guidance andencouragement whenever I needed it.

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