Ferenczi’s Times: The Tangent, the Segment, and the Meandering Line

The article examines Sándor Ferenczi’s ideas about time and psychoanalytic technique. It proposes three metaphors for making sense of Ferenczi’s times: originary time (the tangent-out), organic time (segments), and pulsating time (the meandering line). For Ferenczi, a differentiated mental process of the analyst characterizes each of these modes of being in time. A clinical vignette explores the workings of these different time threads during an analytic session.