T I M E AS A DIMENSION

PETER HARTOCOLLIS,
hI.D., PH.D.
OF AFFECTS

A
BRAHAbl (1911) ONCE SAID that “anxiety and depression are re-
lated to each other in the same way as are fear and grief. We
fear a coming evil; we grieve over one that has occurred”
(p. 137). A temporal frame of reference is, indeed, what relates
these affects to each other in Abraham’s formulation. Anxiety,
like fear, refers to a “coming evil”; depression, like grief, to “one
that has occurred.” In this presentation I will try to show that
psychological or experiential time is a qualitative determinant of
affects.
After developing his structural theory OE personality, Freud
(1926) defined anxiety as something that takes place in the ego. In
perceiving danger and the possibility of being overwhelmed by
adverse internal or external forces, the ego experiences anxiety,
which then serves as a signal for action, for defense agninst the
danger. Freud postulated that anxiety, as the ego’s automatic
reaction to danger, is conditioned by ubiquitous infantile situa-
tions of helplessness, such as the threat of loss of love objects and,
eventually, the threat of castration. Freud, however, emphasized
that anxiety is experienced when the ego perceives a threat and a
conditional helplessness, the possibility of being overwhelmed by
an event in the future-i.e., the anticipation of a dangerous event,
catastrophic in its implications but still avoidable.
More recently, Bibring (1 953) proposed that depression, like
anxiety, is an ego experience triggered by the cognition of an
event of catastrophic significance; but in the case of depression this
Staff Psychiatrist and Director of Research, The C. F. Menninger Memorial
Hospital, Topeka. Kansas.

92
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 TlhlE A N D AFFECTS 93

event is perceived as unavoidable. According to this view, the ego

experiences depression when perceiving itself in a condition of
irrevocable helplessness; not as threatened, but as defeated,
“doomed.” As Zetzel (1960) put it, “TYhile anxiety may be defined
as the ego response to a disaster which threatens, depression repre-
sents its response to one which has materialized” (p. 480). Abra-
ham, Freud, ‘Bibring, and others who imply that anxiety and
depression are conditioned by the subject’s orientation in time,
may find the idea too obvious to elaborate. Yet the presence or
absence of a time dimension in experience seems to me crucial for
the understanding of these as well as other affects.
T h e concept of time refers to two different realities: one that
is defined as mathematical, rational, or “thought” time, and an-
other that stands for subjective, experiential, or “lived” time
(Bergson, 1911; Reichenbach, 1951). It is the latter reality that
Bertrand Russell (1929) had in mind when he said, “The impor-
..
tance of time is . rather in relation to our desires than in rela-
tion to truth” (p. 21). According to my thesis, what determines
the “lived” time’s position along the continuum of future-present-
past’is not the individual’s cognition of external reality, but rather
the way he perceives his own state of adequacy (what Freud and
Bibring referred to as the ego’s experience of helplessness) regard-
ing some adverse or challenging reality, within or without himself,
to which his attention becomes obsessively cathected.
Actually, as James (1890) long ago recognized, no matter what
the position of the external event or its mental representation on
the continuum of time, the feeling of time is always in the present.
T h e traumatic event that the ego perceives may be real or imag-
inary, external or internal, future or past; but it is invariably felt
in the ego itself-as intrasystemic tension in the present. T h e ego
experience-whether anxiety or depression-is immediate, felt
within the dynamic system of the ego as a painful event in the
present.
Schachter and Singer (1 962), among academic psychologists,
and ‘Shur (1969), among psychoanalysts, have emphasized the role
of cognition in the determination of affects. In order to experience
a certain affect as such, the ego must first perceive a given situa-
tion as relevant to its own well-being, to its needs or aspirations,

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94 PETER HARTOCOLLIS

and on the basis of past experience assess its capacity to cope with
it. When the ego assesses itself as incompetent, the result is a
painful tension in the ego-variously described as a decrease in
self-esteem (Bibring’s [I9531 narcissistic core of the ego), as a state
of helplessness, or as a breach in the ego’s boundaries (Ramzy and
FVallerstein, 1958)-but not yet anxiety or depression or anything
as specific as that. What determines whether this tension will as-
sume the specific quality of anxiety or depression is the ego’s
orientation in time, which in turn is determined by the ego’s
assessment of its own state of adequacy as potential (future) or
actual (past).
T o the extent that the ego can perceive the noxious influence
-in essence, the ego’s own inadequacy-as something that is still
in the future, only potential and therefore avoidable, the experi-
ence tends to be that of anxiety rather than depression. It is the
hope or awareness of the probability characteristic of the sense of
future that gives to the affective experience the quality of anxiety.
As Flugel (1955) put it, “apprehension as to what is to come is the
great price that man has to pay for his power of foreseeing the
course of future events and adapting his conduct so as to influence
them favorably” (p. 192).
T h e relationship of anxiety as an affect and the subject’s
particular orientation in time may be illustrated by the following
sequence of a patient’s associations:
T h e day before her analyst was going to leave for his summer
vacation, the patient complained that she had a headache. “I feel
awful,” she continued. “I have a feeling like something bad is going
to happen, a feeling as if something is going to happen in the
world-more than a feeling about what is going to happen to me.
It seems bigger, more global. I have this feeling of apprehension
about what is going to happen, I don’t know how to explain it,
may be just a larger concern that just-I don’t know, it’s exactly
like I am afraid the whole world is going to blow up, as if I am
afraid about what is going to happen to the future . , I definitely .
feel it’s a feeling of insecurity, of something about the future. It’s
mostly that I am concerned about your going away.”
Conversely, by perceiving itself inadequate in relation to a
noxious event in the past, the ego assesses its reality as inescapable,

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 T I N E AND AFFECTS 95

unavoidable, irrevocable-finality being the essence of the past.

And the ensuing experience is one of depression. T h e following
vignette illustrates the affect of depression as related to the sense
of time:
TVhile helping his father mow the lawn, a young boy had his
hand caught by the blade of the motor. Even though no fingers
were lost and the surgeon who treated the boy reassured him that
everything seemed to be in order, the boy's father felt depressd
and remained depressed for several days. T h e memory of'the
accident kept coming compulsively to his mind along with the
realization that he had anticipated the danger, but only too late
to prevent it from turning into a disaster. He thought of all the
various ways the accident could have been avaided, blaming him-
self for not instructing the boy better, blaming his wife for having
suggested that he let the boy help him or for insisting that they
should pick u p the cut grass right away, a thought that brought
back to mind the fact that he himself had used his hands to pick
small masses of grass dangerously close to the blade of the machine
in front of the boy, who had apparently imitated him. He remem-
bered thinking that it might rain that afternoon, in which case
he would not have been able to do the work and the whole thing
would have been avoided. He remembered the day before, riding
with the boy on their bikes to watch the trains before supper, and
wished that he had done it that afternoon too, instead of mowing
the lawn. It was as if he were trying to find an escape hatch, some-
thing to take him away from what happened that afternoon, only
to be faced with the inevitability of the event. He felt trapped
around the memory of the event as if that were the only reality and
everything else subordinate to it, unnecessary, inevitable, and ir-
reversible antecedent. H e felt lost for being unable to find his way
out of it, in a land where there was only one sense ol time: that
of the past.
JVhile in this state of depression, he could continue his work,
moving and communicating 'in the present and planning for the
future, but nothing in the present or future held any appeal for
him. And unless he made a concerted effort to resist the tempta-
tion, his mind was at any moment ready to return to the past.
An impending calamity, however, might result in a depressive

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96 PETER IIARTOCOLLIS

affect rather than anxiety if the ego became convinced that the
calamity was actual or certain-as if the damage had already been
done, even though, objectively, it might still be in the future. If
the awareness of the possibility that the catastrophic event may be
avoided is weak or absent, in other words, when the ego loses the
ability to perceive the possibility of escaping defeat, the noxious
event is no longer perceived in the future but as something al-
ready in the past. Intellectually, the individual may recognize that
the event lies in the future, but he feels depressed-as in the
following example.
A middle-aged woman, in psychotherapy for a number of
years because of an obsessive-compulsive illness, had periodic at-
tacks of anxiety during which she worried about money. She knew
that her financial resources, modest as they were, could sustain her
celibate and frugal existence for a long time. But she would look
into the future and feel anxious, imagining that something might
go wrong and one day leave her penniless and resourceless. She
was advised to get a job, but she could not find any available to
her liking. Then, following a series of adversities, none of which
affected her financial situation, she began to complain of increased
anxiety and also of depression, becoming so handicapped that
hozpitalization was recommended. Even though she could have
afforded to be a private patient, she insisted on being admitted to
a state hospital, claiming that she was poor-a notion she justified
with the argument that she could not hope to leave the hospital
before all her money tvas gone. I n talking about her financial situ-
ation, she gave indeed the impression that she was already desti-
tute. She also described herself as hopeless and helpless and
without a future. Her suffering was obviously actual and urgent,
but her affective experience was oriented explicitly toward the
past.
In discussing the mechanism of depression, Bibring (1953)
pointed out that boredom is a comparable, phenomenologically
allied, affect. More than any other affect, boredom is experienced
as a disturbance in the sense of time, as an inability to synchronize
attention with the activities of the surroundings or, in their ab-
sence, with one.'s own fantasy life. T h e experience generally in-
volves a sense of impatience with the self and the environment; a

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 T I N E AND AFFECTS 97

sense of frustration, dissatisfaction, and want; a vague need for

something, for an interest or outlet. As such, it is an unpleasant
or painful feeling, even though it may not impress the observer as
much as the suffering that depression or anxiety usually suggest.
In metapsychological terms, boredom results from a partial selec-
tive repression, wherein the ideational representation of sexual or
aggressive wishes is repressed (Le., the object or goal of the wishes
is unconscious), but the instincts can still be felt. As Fenichel
(1953) put it, “The instinctual tension is present, the instinctual
aim is missing” (p. 293). In other words, boredom is the result oE
the awareness of the instincts without tlie awareness oE their
meaning.
IShat, then, the ego experiences in boredom is a defeat, a
sense of inadequacy that has all tlie attributes of a finite failure,
but which is not projected temporally, either into the past or into
the future. T h e ego is able, for the time being at least, to check
the threatening impulses so well as to deny them all meaning,
including the meaning of danger and future. At the same time, the
ego i s not able to use its energy in any context, to pursue any goal,
being bogged down by the dangerous forces. T h e ego feels de-
feated, its boundaries breached. But, again, the experience of
defeat, occurring without a cognitive context, is devoid oE all
meaning, including that of the pa&. As its inadequacy-the breach
in its boundaries-cannot be placed in a time perspective, future
or past, the ego esperiences neither anxiety nor depression but a
sense oE impatience with the present.
Commenting on the subjective tiine peculiar to the experi-
ence of boredom, Fenichel recognized-albeit reluctantly-the
possibility of a primary disturbance of the ego regarding the ex-
perience of time, n disturbance which might facilitate the emer-
gence and operation oE what he considered the mechanism of bore-
dom, i.e., the repression of the drive-aims and the vain search for
substitutes in external stitnulation that is only too remotely related
to primary instinctual aims. In pathological cases of boredom, such
as that experienced by individuals with a borderline personality
organization, the picture is much more complicated, reflecting a
deficit in internalized object-relationsiiips which could be associ-
ated with a defective superego. Greenson (1953) has likened the

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98 PETER HARTOCOLLIS

emptiness experienced by such people to what might be felt by a

“hungry child with the image of ‘no mother,’ ‘no breast,’ ‘mother
will not come’ ” (p. 17). T h e ego suffers from the awareness of
strong oral, libidinal and aggressive impulses, which are denied
representation and, therefore, are deprived of time perspective in
terms of either the future or the past. An example of the way the
affect of boredom is colored by the subject’s particular orientation
in time folloivs:
A young woman began her analytic hour by expressing the
wish to take a trip, perhaps go to Nepal. She was not interested in
cultural things when traveling, she said, and when in a museum
she became bored very quickly. She felt as though she ought to be
interested in things in a museum, but she just got very tired. Then
she talked about how unreal everything in the world seemed to
her. Things 15 minutes in the past are just shadows of what they
were, and things 15 minutes in the future can barely be compre-
hended because she cannot imagine that they would be real. She
said it was safer that way. At this point, her analyst noted that the
patient’s voice became “very flat and monotonous.”
T h e suggested affect here is one of boredom with overtones of
depersonalization. Bibring (1953) has pointed out that these two
affects are related to depression, and that all three represent states
of mental inhibition. H e distinguished boredom from depersonal-
ization on the basis of the kind of instinctual drives that are main-
tained but actively blocked from consciousness-libidinal drives
in the case of boredom, and aggressive ones in the case of deperson-
alization. TVhat, according to Bibring. distinguishes these two
from depression is that in boredom and depersonalization “the
self-esteem of the person remains outside of the field of conflict”
(p. 32).
T h e contention that a person who experiences boredom or
depersonalization does not suffer a decrease of self-esteem seems
questionable, however, when one considers the fact that both bore-
dom and depersonalization are unhappy experiences, even though,
for some individuals, preferable to those of depression or anxiety.
Indeed, it is not unusual to hear patients express relief for feeling
depressed rather than anxious; and yet, implicitly, a condition of
anxiety carries with it more hope than a condition of depression.

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 TIME AND AFFECTS 99

T h e fact that the quality of the experience in boredom and de-

personalization, in comparison to depression and anxiety, and the
degree of suffering involved in these two sets of affects are different
may be better accounted for by the difference in the lvay the in-
dividnal experiences himself and his inadequacy lvitli reference to
the time continuum. I n the preceding example the subject, des-
cribing her discomfort either as boredom or depersonalization,
finds it difTicult to experience time as either past or future. She
experiences herself in a slow-moving, almost immobile present,
which she obviously does not enjoy, yet finds preferable-“safer”
-to either a past or a future orientation which might bring about
depression or anxiety. Significantly, this patient was prone to
severe anxiety attacks.
It has been observed that the sense of time becomes disturbed
when the person’s identity and set of values are vulnerable or be-
come threatened. Disturbed adolescents experience “time diffu-
sion,” as Erikson (1959) put it, “a loss of the ego’s function of
maintaining perspective and expectancy, [a condition in which]
every delay appears to be a deceit, every wait an experience of
impotence, every hope a danger, every plan a catastrophe, every
potential provider a traitor. Therefore, time must be made to
stand still . . .” (p. 141). Characteristically, the performance of
patients with antisocial personality disorders in projective tests
like the T A T and the Korschach tends to display a limited aware-
ness of time, future or past, and an impoverished affectivity. Such
patients appear restless and often complain of boredom, which
they try to escape by becoming involved in fast or violent action
(I. Rosen, personal communication).
Like anxiety, depression, and boredom, other affects, painful
as well as pleasurable, can be placed into a cognitive relationship
involving the ego’s self-assessed adequacy and its position along
the continuum of subjective time. For the piirpose of demonstra-
tion rather than because of any intent to account for the entire
spectrum of affects, I will continue with negative, unpleasurable
ones for a while, using as a frame of reference the triad of anxiety-
boredom-depression and their corresponding position on the
continuum oE time. I n the process, I will have to refine my con-

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100 PETER HARTOCOLLIS

ceptualization of affective experience so as to distinguish between

affects which have reference to the same time-orientation.
An affect of central importance for psychoanalytic psychology
is guilt. Anna Freud (1936) defined guilt as simply “superego anx-
iety,” the affect experienced by the ego when threatened by the
superego. Analysts such as Fenichel (19451 and van der Waals
(1948) recognized a temporal element in guilt when they found it
necessary to distinguish between feelings of conscience which judge
the past, and guilt feelings which warn about the future. As Fen-
ichel has pointed out, “Guilt feeling proper-that is, the feeling
‘I have done wrong,’ a painful judgment about some past occur-
rence which has the character of remorse-must be distinguished
from feelings of conscience which do not judge the past but the
future: ‘I should do this,’ or ‘I should not do that.’ This part of
conscience has a warning function and directs future actions of
the personality” (p. 134).
Indeed, the subjective quality of guilt will differ depending
on the ego’s position along the dimension of time as it perceives
itself to be inadequate in a conflict that involves the superego.
Such a perception could place the ego’s impairment in the past
and therefore make the affect of guilt an experience similar to
depression. T h e fact that guilt and depression are often experi-
enced concommitantly would indicate a common temporal orien-
tation of the ego. On the other hand, the possibility of breaking
a prohibition imposed by the superego, and the threat of punish-
ment on the part of the superego, would place the ego’s impair-
ment, as far as the cognitive functions of the ego are concerned,
into the future. As Spiegel (1966) observed, “anxiety deriving from
the anticipatory function of the superego necessarily has a quality
of futurity attached to it. It may take the ordinary normal.form of
general concern about the future” (p. 330). Such an experience
might be expected to resemble that of anxiety rather than depres-
sion, To put it in a different way, whenever the superego is
involved in the conflict that confronts the ego, anxiety or depres-
sion acquire an overtone of guilt.
If the sense of time is, indeed, a qualifier of the ego’s experi-
ence when confronted by a traumatic event, then referring to the
affect that results from the ego’s confrontation with the superego

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 TIME AND AFFECTS 101

regarding some past performance as guilt, and to the affect that

results from the superego’s warning about some future ego per-
formance also as guilt presents a problem. hfy suggestion would
be to reserve the term guilt for the experience that refers to the
future and resembles anxiety, while assigning to the exprience
that refers to the past and resembles depression the term “remorse.”
Fenichel (1945) pointed the way. Some of Melanie Klein’s fol-
lowers (Money-Kyrle, 1955, Grinberg, 1964) have also referred to
two kinds of guilt: depressive as distinct from persecutory, identi-
fying the former with feelings of grief and remorse and the latter
with resentment, fear, and anxiety.
That the superego influences time perception has been pointed
out by a number of analytic writers. T h e ability to recognize time,
however, particularly to anticipate the future and to orient one’s
actions according to it, is said to develop as an independent ego
variable along with reality testing (Bonaparte, 1940, Hartmann,
1939). T h e development of the superego strengthens the ego’s
function of anticipation with regard to the demands of the id. As
Spiegel (1966) put it, “the superego, when ‘finally’ established,
significantly assists, perhaps (partially) replaces, the ego as the
chief internal sensory organ of the mental apparatus [and] this
assistance results in a finer calibration of the function of (internal)
anticipation” (p. 3 15). I n organizing the internalized parental
demands and aspirations together with the primitive ideals of
grandiosity or perfection that develop in the infant’s fantasy
world, the superego creates a general directionality toward the
future. T h e superego shows the road of the future to the ego, as-
sisting the ego in its constant comparison between actual states
and intended or aspired ones (0.Kernberg, personal communica-
tion). ’

Another affect related to anxiety is fear. Fear, of course, im-

plies an ego orientation toward the future. TVhat distinguishes
fear from anxiety is that the former occurs it1 a situation of danger
where the threat to the ego is distinctly perceived as external, i.e.,
in outer reality, where the ego is able to outline the danger-either
because it originates in an external object or event, as in a wild
beast or a natural disaster, or because it is displaced onto an
external object or event, as in phobias. I n contrast, anxiety occurs

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102 PETER HARTOCOLLIS

when the threatening forces are primarily intrapsychic and only

vaguely defined, as in the case of a threat from the id or the super-
ego. I n the face of danger, it is the ability of the ego to commit it-
self to a course of action, or rather the perceived effectiveness of
the action to cope with the danger, that determines whether the
prevailing affect is fear or anxiety. As Epstein (1967) has pointed
out, the more vague the source of danger, the more difficult to
perceive the possibility of coping with the situation by engaging
oneself in directed activity, and the more one is likely to experi-
ence anxiety rather than fear. Otherwise, both fear and anxiety
refer to affects that result from the ego’s assessment of its adequacy
in terms of the future, the ego perceiving a state of helplessness
which may or may not prevail-uncertain, avoidable, something
in the future.
Arising from the loss of a valued object when the latter re-
mains external and distinctively identifiable, grief is to depression
what fear is in relation to anxiety. As with depression, grief results
from the ego’s assessment of itself as inadequate with reference to
something that has already happened, that belongs to the past.
Fatigue and anger are both affects which, like boredom, are
experienced when the ego is unable to project itself and its in-
adequacy into time-future or past. But, in contrast to boredom,
the forces that cause the inadequacy are identifiable, either be-
cause they are not repressed or because they are externa1.l T o the
extent that the unattainable instinctual aim-sexual or aggressive
-is repressed, the experience is tinted with the quality of bore-
dom or depersonalization. A predominance of sexual drive gives
rise to fatigue; a predominance of aggressive drive leads to anger.
This distinction according to the instinctual source of the conflict
1 In fact, what is identified as the cause of fatigue or of anger may not be the
true or original cause of theie affects, but rather some substitute object against
whom these affects can be displaced and without whom ‘no such affects (only un-
differentiated tension) can be experienccd. As is true for drives. affects tend to have
an object, which is identified as the cause or source of the affect (fear, fatigue,
anger, grief, etc.). Such an object becomes the focus of the ideational equivalent of
the affect and provides the opportunity for goal-directed behavior. But as this ob-
ject can be substituted by a more convenient one, it can also be repressed, in which
case the affect acquires a different quality, similar b u t not identical to that experi-
enced when the object is identifiable, ir., within the awareness of the subject. Thus
we have experiential pairs of affects, such as fear-anxiety, boredom-fatigue, anger-
depersonalization. grief-depression, and so on.

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 TIME AND AFFECTS 103

corresponds to the one made earlier concerning boredom and

depersonalization.
Knowing about the ego’s particular orientation in time does
not help to explain why the ego feels inadequate, threatened, or
doomed, when faced with a traumatic situation. It is the other
way around perhaps-what creates the doubts or conviction of
inadequacy may explain the ego’s proclivity to orient itself into
the future or the past. It is a matter of personal, subjective inter-
pretation whether a prisoner on hearing his death sentence views
it as his doom or, on the contrary, as a period of grace, limited,
but pregnant with rescue or escape possibilities.
As Freud said about anxiety, Bibring about depression, and
Greenson about boredom, the tendency to feel anxious or de-
pressed or bored when faced with adverse circumstances is deter-
mined not so much by what confronts the ego in the present
(including the actual state of id or superego); it is regressively
based on traumatic infantile experiences of helplessness, a fixation
on situations whereby the ego-or, rather, the self-was separated
from its love objects, and was exposed to frustration which could
not be met adequately by the ego’s own resources. But it is also
with such experiences that the child learns to appreciate the im-
portance of the love object, the child’s own separateness from
mother and its dependence on her. It is in the process of such a
development that the child learns to anticipate the coming OE the
love object, to recall the pain of its loss and, in turn, to anticipate
such pain so as to cope with the dangerous situation before it be-
comes traumatic again. According to Erikson (1956), “The experi-
ence of temporal cycles and of time qualities are inherent in and
develop from the initial problems of mounting need tension, of
delay of satisfaction, and final unification with the satisfying ‘ob-
ject’ ” (p. 97). And according to Jacobson (1964), “Object con-
stancy develops. Specific affect qualities and more sustained
emotional states come into being. . . . A concept of the self as an
entity that has continuity and direction is formed” (p. 53). Lack
of differentiaton between self and object is presumably accom-
panied by an experience of timelessness, re-experienced in the
“fantasy in which mother and child are endlessly united” (p. 206)
(Bergler and Roheim, 1946).

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104 PETER HARTOCOLLIS

Speaking of the ego as the seat of anxiety and affects, in gen-

eral, is a respectable convention; but it presents problems. For
the ego is also the agency that utilizes affects as signals for action.
Thus; it is passive and active at the same time, both subject and
function. Such a conceptual ambiguity explains why a number of
psychoanalytic writers (Hartmann, 1950; Jacobson, 1964) have
felt the need to define a special entity within the ego, or super-
ceding the ego, namely, the concept of the self; or something
similar to the concept of the self: “ego identity” (Erikson) or the
“realm of experience” (Sandler and Joffe, 1969). I t would then be
the “self” or the “realm of experience” (conscious or unconscious)
within the ego that is the seat of anxiety and affects in general.
As Levin (1969) put it recently, “Anxiety over a danger in self-
object relations is experienced within the self; in the course of its
development the ego comes to take this anxiety as a signal to set
defenses in motion” (p. 48). Then the experience could be one
pertaining to self-esteem and its fluctuations, or to a “level of
safety feeling,” or “basic feeling state” (Sandler and Joffe, 1969).
That an anxious person has the proclivity to orient himself
in the direction of the future, while a depressed individual tends
to orient himself retrospectively, does not necessarily explain why
he tends to orient himself in the one direction or the other. My
proposition is that affects like anxiety, depression, boredom and
so on, are experiences with an inherent time dimension-the
quality of the experience being necessarily conditioned by the
ego’s orientation in time. I n other words, the sense of time con-
tributes a unique experiential quality to anxiety, depression, bore-
dom, and so on. Knowing about this relationship adds to the
understanding of affective experiences as independent subjective
phenomena and also as they relate to each other. In fact, such an
understanding may apply not only to painful experience, but also
to positive affects like joy and elation. Thus, Kurt Goldstein (1939)
has observed that brain-damaged individuals who cannot take the
attitude toward something as merely possible, having lost the
ability to anticipate the future, cannot experience joy in the usual
adult sense. They experience, instead, an affect which may appear
on the surface like joy, but in essence is the experience of pleasure
by relief of tension.

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 TIME AND AFFECTS 105

T h e understanding that painful affects are the experiential

equivalents of the ego’s temporal perception of the self as inade-
quate can be transferred to pleasurable affects, which may be seen
as determined by the ego’s assessment-justifiable or not-of its
own adequacy in a temporal framework, its success in maintaining
the integrity of the self against internal and external odds, in
overcoming or avoiding dangerous situations, in growing stronger
and safer, in expanding and conquering, i n creating. Thus, as the
perception of danger results in the experience of anxiety and other
similar painful affects, the anticipation of gratification or success
results in happy excitement that may be identified as euphoria,
zest for life, cheerful confidence in the future, and the like. I n
Jacobson’s (1953) words, “the expectation of future gratification
appears to induce pleasurable affect components which we are
entitled to call signal affects too, though of the pleasurable variety”
(P. 64).
At the other end of the time scale, the perception of one’s self
as successful, the assessment of adequacy, and the ego’s projection
into a satisfactory past, results in a positive experience, the height
of which may be described as elation. T h e fact that elation has
been identified as the defensive counterpart of depression (Lewin,
1950) would justify the use of the term in describing the experi-
ence of a sense of accomplishment in terms of the past. Bibring
(1953) contrasted elation with depression by pointing out that it
expresses a state of “fulfillment.” IVhen, however, the ego in the
assessment of its success, instead of orienting itself into the future
or the past, focuses its perception onto the present, an experience
akin to boredom should take place, only that it would be pleasur-
able. Such a pleasurable affect without reference to time, future
or past, may correspond to what is described as peace of mind,
ecstasy, or nirvana. This is the experience that some people under
the influence of alcohol or LSD seem to achieve momentarily, an
experience that they characteristically describe as devoid of all
anxiety-and, of course, free from depression. Significantly, some
of those who have described such an experience point out that
they also experience a sense of timelessness, as if time no longer
exists for them (Hartocollis, 1962; Freedman, 1968). I n such a
state of ecstasy, the present becomes eternity, as in the experience

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106 PETER HARTOCOLLIS

of boredom, except that the subject is able to enjoy it rather than

suffer with it; to be with it, rather than without.
Of course, all adult experience is to a certain degree time ori-
ented; and there is always reference to past, present, or future in
varying proportions, but all interacting. This is the classical Hart-
ley-Hamilton-James conception of the “stream of thought” (G.
Murphy, personal communication). But what I would call specific
to the subject of affects is that the ego’s particular orientation in
time provides an essential element in the qualification of a particu-
lar affective experience, determining to a large extent whether the
experience is going to be that of anxiety, depression, elation, and
so on. I n such a limited-and limiting-sense, one may speak of
time (and I speak always about psychological, lived, or subjective
time) as a dimension of affectivity-without, of course, implying
that time is not a dimension of mental life as a whole.

Summary

Everyday and clinical experience suggest that the sense of time,

what is known as psychological or experiential time, is an essential
factor in the determination of the quality of affects.
In order to feel either anxiety or depression, one must first
perceive a given situation as dangerous, and then assess oneself as
inadequate. T h e result is a painful tension, but not yet anxiety or
depression. JVhat determines whether this tension-felt as a de-
crease in self-esteem or as a state of helplessness-will assume the
specific quality of anxiety or depression is the individual’s orien-
tation in time. IVhen perceiving the noxious influence-in es-
sence, inadequacy-as something in the future, only potential and
therefore avoidable, one experiences anxiety. JVhen perceiving
oneself as inadequate in the past, one experiences depression.
Judging oneself as inadequate while being unable to place
the inadequacy in a time perspective, future or past, results in a
sense of impatience with the present; and the overall experience is
that of boredom. On the positive side, affects like joy or elation
occur when the person judges himself adequate rather than in-
adequate with reference to some future or past, real or imaginary,
event. An ecstatic, nirvana-like experience, induced by certain

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 TIME AND AFFECTS 107

drugs and characterizing the condition of a person who is in love

and feels loved, obtains when the individual perceives himself as
adequate in the absence of any concern for time, future or past.
I n general, affects, painful and pleasurable alike, can be placed
into a cognitive relationship involving subjective adequacy along
the continuum of experiential time.

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Submitted December 30, I970

C. F. Afenninger Meniorial Hospital
Topeka, Kansas 66601

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