Distortions and disjunctions of temporalities in times of pandemic.

ABSTRACT

Since the Covid pandemic required the implementation of restrictions, my patients have been concerned with their experience of time, which seemed distorted by the state of emergency impacting on our lives, and often elicited the feeling of inhabiting a dystopian world. There appear existential demands for subjective meaning, especially when the fear of death is so intense it appears uncontainable. The state of uncertainty impacts upon the sense of the future, and hence on desire and hope affect states that emerge primarily from the internal world. Within the framework of Western thought, time is linear (Cronos), cyclical and recursive (Aion) or fugitively punctual (Kairos). These figures of time implicate the interaction between the internal and external world within a first-person account. The paper focuses on Kairos - that critical moment where the subject's sense of reality through attention serves self-protective functions and leads to action. Kairos is also the temporality of trauma. Vignettes from two patients, of different ages and in different phases of analyses, illustrate the subjective vicissitudes of Kairos, depending on the state of the self, ego, and biographical inscriptions in a wider human chronology. Freud's equation perception=attention=time captures the psychic work and significance of the temporality of Kairos.