Time in Practice: Temporality, Intersubjectivity, and Listening Differently

by Mary Lynne Ellis

Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2024 (Second Edition)

An original exploration of diverse ways in which individuals ‘live’ time, consciously and unconsciously. Challenging the psychoanalytic emphasis on the past as determinative, Mary Lynne Ellis explores the significance of present and future dimensions of individuals’ experiences which catalyses change in the analytical relationship.

Through critical analyses of the theorizing of Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan, Ellis highlights the limitations of spatial metaphors, binaries of ‘inner’/‘outer’, in addressing the socio-political and historical specificity of patients’ experiences, including questions of identity and discrimination. She explores how intersectional and interdisciplinary perspectives allow for the development of new interpretations of temporality/intersubjectivity/language/embodiment in analytical practices. Ellis reflects on the dynamism of conceptualizations emergent in autobiography, fiction, phenomenological and postmodern philosophy, gender, post-colonial, queer, and cultural studies, for contemporary relational psychoanalytic practices. This revised and updated edition includes discussion of experiences of loss, vulnerability, mortality, inequalities, and powerlessness associated with the profound impact of the spread of the coronavirus, climate change, and the Ukraine war. It also includes a new chapter on mourning, time, and identities.