Making Time

In late March 2012, about 30 psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic students, and candidates from several different institutions and afﬁ liations in New York, a group composed for the most part of those who are nowadays referred to as early career professionals, gathered to talk about the contemporary state of psychoanalytic formation and training. They met under the signiﬁ er Unbehagen, a reference of course to Freud’s text Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930). But how should we take the meaning of this Unbehagen? When the essay was ﬁrst being translated into English, Freud suggested to the translator, Joan Riviere, that it might be rendered as Man’s Discomfort in Civilization. But she settled onCivilization and its Discontents. The German dictionary Langensheidt simply suggests unease for Unbehagen. In his introduction, James Strachey writes that the French word malaise might best capture Freud’s meaning. The malaise that concerned Freud was a consequence of the loss of passion that he considered to be a necessary sacriﬁ ce for living in civilized society. Sexual passions, and also especially the passion of unrestrained aggression, were simply too disruptive to complex groups and to interdependent lives lived in the close quarters of civilized society. If for Freud this Unbehagen was the inescapable condition of civilized life, why would a group of psychoanalysts organize a meeting under this concept, as though there were something, some particular discontent in their lot, which could be addressed and perhaps alleviated? Were they casting doubt on Freud’s infamous pessimism about the inevitable conditions of civilized life? Were they asserting a naïve belief that they should escape this universal fate?
Of course, not all social discontent is of the same type. It might be that people
In a city under siege, time (not space) is the enemy. If I had only one sentence to describe my experience of watching Šejla Kameri´´c’s and Anri Sala’s collaborative project 1395 Days Without Red, this would be it: In a city under siege, time (not space) is the enemy. The city is Sarajevo, the time are the 1,395 days that the Serbian army terrorized the besieged citizens from the surrounding mountains. An invisible enemy, lying in wait. Sala and Kameri´´c created, developed, and shot their project together but made two separate ﬁlms edited from the same footage. Both ﬁlms evoke the terror and devastation brought about by the siege without showing it. No images of wounded or dead bodies, bomb craters, or demolished buildings are given. Instead, we follow a young woman on her solitary journey across town. What we cannot see (but some of us remember having seen) is more important than what is presented to us on the screen. In this mental cityscape (where people don’t do what people normally do in ﬁlms: speak), sound functions as a time machine that gives both ﬁlms their distinct tempo, temperament, and temporality, creating a temporal space at odds with itself. Often we hear one thing—sections from Tschaikovsky’s Pathetique, for example—and see another—a woman walking on the street, people waiting at a corner; and when we see what we hear—the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra rehearsing—the image says just that: this is what a rehearsal looks like. The disconnect between the visual (space) and the aural (time) and the lack of speech and narrative make us wonder what it means to be in the world with others. We all need and seek relationships, but for some of us there are moments, days, weeks, months, even years when we cannot afford to be attuned to those around us. What it looks (and sounds) like when separation becomes a way of living together is (among other things) what 1395 Days Without Red is about.
At ﬁrst glance the two ﬁlms look identical: a young woman (played by Spanish actress Maribel Verdú), smartly clad in steel blue turtleneck and wool overcoat, black jeans, comfortable boots, and fashionable leather rucksack is crossing a melancholic urban landscape devoid of human connection and fellow feeling: the city of Sarajevo. Her face earnest and determined, her long black hair tied into a knot, we don’t know where she’s headed or where she’s coming from. A solitary ﬁgure. This is not our typical ﬂaneuse strolling the streets of Sarajevo in search of an urban experience, this is dangerous business: Don’t go, don’t go with the ﬂow! she seems to tell herself. Over and over, time and again. As she stops at crossings and intersections, we watch her joining small clusters (group would be the wrong word here) of men and women, just like her trying to determine the “right” moment to cross what since the beginning of the siege has been called “Sniper Alley.” Not a word, not a look of recognition; no greetings, no embraces. No one follows anybody’s lead. Nothing is shared. What moves her? How does she stay sane?Filmmakers are, of course, experts on making and manipulating time (and space). They can be snipers waiting for the decisive moment, the perfect shot; they can be conductors using reality to create a time of difference, a temporal experience that evokes the subjective rhythm of the unconscious. Sala and Kameri´´c are both, which is why in 1395 Days Without Red they are able to tell us something both vivid and subtle about the obvious fact that it takes time to survive a siege.Psychoanalysts are, of course, also experts on the making and manipulation of time (and space). Freud envisioned the psychoanalytic setting as a form of siege, a “trial of patience” in which the patient must be brought to accept the idea that his illness is “an enemy worthy of mettle”; and that what he has come for is murder—“one cannot kill an enemy who is absent or not within range”—while “the doctor has nothing else to do than wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened.” The analyst must be alert, as “the patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment—weapons which we must wrest from him one by one.” Not surprisingly, when Freud writes about war (as he does in his 1915 essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”), he has very little to say that may help us think through the times of war. At second glance each of the two ﬁlms has its own rhythm and tempo. Reﬂections and refractions of each other (the ﬁlms are meant to be shown simultaneously in a gallery space), subtle differences in timing create two different journeys across the city. Sala’s ﬁlm is driven by fear: fast-paced, forward-looking, suspenseful. Kameri´´c’s version moves according to the quieter and more hesitant rhythm of mourning and melancholia (a more time-consuming mode, her ﬁlm is 20 minutes longer than Sala’s): slow-paced, reﬂective, backwardlooking. Together they create a third space that is entirely aural—a space created by the ﬁlms’ sound and music as it leaves the frame of one ﬁlm and travels toward the other. This is not only a statement about the impossibility of choosing between escape and withdrawal as we respond to danger and loss; it is a vivid and moving evocation of how in times of trauma we depend on our ability to make time, and step out of sync. If we cannot speak about time without evoking space, Donald Winnicott’s The Place Where We Live seems an obvious text to start thinking about, from a psychoanalytic point of view, what it means to make time. Doing so involves a slight shift of attention: where Winnicott asks where, I ask when. Where Winnicott is concerned with a potential space where “cultural experience and play” take place, I’m concerned with describing the potential time when we feel we are in sync with someone else. Winnicott’s question is, “What, for instance, are we doing when we are listening to a Beethoven symphony?” My question is, “What kind of time, for instance, are we making when we are listening to a Tchaikovsky symphony?”Winnicott begins his essay with the “wish to examine the place, using the word in an abstract sense, where we most of the time are when we are experiencing life…when we are doing what in fact we are doing a great deal of our time, namely, enjoying ourselves.” We are, he proposes, situated in a “potential space” that mediates between the world of inner psychic reality and the world of outer reality. This potential or third space is the space in which we live and play with others—together alone, attached yet separate. It is a space of possibilities, where we become involved and form relationships. This potential space may be large or small, colorful or painted in shades of grey; a space that we learn to make as we separate from those who took care of us when we were infants. “Playing and cultural experience,” Winnicott goes on, “are things we value in a special way; these link the past, the present and the future; they take up time and space.” Put in the vocabulary of temporality, “cultural experience” happens when we are in sync with one or more people; when we are on the same wavelength. Although most people most of the time feel a natural inclination to form attachments and become attuned to one another, this third area is never simply there; it needs to be built and maintained. It depends, says Winnicott, “for its existence on living experiences,” and it requires our active involvement—even though we may not always be aware that what we’re doing is taking place, and making time. Yet there are times when it becomes necessary to avoid this third space—a siege is one of those times—and it is precisely through making our own time that we can avoid being hit by the unpredictable possibilities that are bound to occur in the third space of cultural experience. But how does one make one’s own time? And what happens to us when we are forced to live a life out of step? After breathing, music is our next best way to make time, our own time. “Tempo, Tempo!” “Allegro.” “Let’s do it again.” “Go slower.” The only words spoken in both ﬁlms are those of conductor Ari Benjamin Meyers, whom we watch rehearsing sections of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique with the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra in what looks like a socialist-style community center—people come and go, many stay and listen in for a while, attentive yet absent-minded, taking in the music as if replenishing their ears, a resource from which they draw when they are in need of time, rhythm, and pace. Meyers’s directions provide cues and orientation not only for the members of the orchestra but even more so for the citizens on their outings. The orchestra and its conductor are the safe keepers of time: as long as they continue to play, time will be on their side; and as long as there is music, there will be ways of making time—our time, not the enemy’s. The Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, which performed throughout the siege (though not under Meyers), is where the city feels it pulse, its heartbeat, and its inspiration. To live a life out of sync is to suspend the ability to imagine oneself in someone else’s shoes. Without a shared temporal space there can be no identiﬁcation and no empathy. For Winnicott, the third space of play and creativity grows out of “the capacity in the therapist (or the mother) to identify with the patient (or the child) out of a feeling ‘if I were in your shoes.’” In times of war, forced to make our own personal time, we backtrack, retrace our steps until we reach a point in time when the other’s needs and vulnerabilities move out of focus. Psychologically speaking, we go back to the time of childhood when the baby has not yet separated the mother from the self. But whereas the baby does not yet know what empathy means, the adult, coaxed into unkindness, must bear the guilt of her selﬁshness.
Après-coup. Can we imagine the same project with a male ﬁgure traversing the city and a female musical director conducting the orchestra? Say Javier Bardem taking cues from JoAnn Falletta or Xian Zhang? Hardly. Not only because most of us ﬁnd it difﬁcult to imagine that in times of trouble a real man would adapt to the tempo and rhythm of a woman. The idea of Bardem (or any male celebrity for that matter) moving sideways rather than confronting the enemy head-on contradicts our cultural notions of masculinity. Women, not men, are perceived as deviant, weak, and vulnerable (the prototypical victim). Women are (we are made to believe), qua gender, naturally out of step, tactless, unreliable. This “unpredictability” has largely served to keep women away from the military as well as from political and economic power. But their assumed lack of tact has also given them the freedom to resist the pressures (and temptations) of walking lockstep with those who hold power. From a historical perspective the male body has been under much greater stress to submit to the rule of synchronization—the military is just one example, classical music is another—which is precisely why men feel inclined (and entitled) to control time (and space). Not always to their own advantage. If I had only one sentence to describe my experience of watching Šejla Kameri´´c and Anri Sala’s 1395 Days Without Red, this would be it: If you think this is over, then you’re wrong.

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Bettina Mathes