The more significant the investment in meaningful and gratifying relationships and activities, the more the moment seems to fly by, but, by the same token, there grows a sense of time having been lived and an enrichment of the total life experience. This is, in fact, a complementary dimension of the experience of time, the sense of time lived intensively. In these last examples of cognitive and traumatic influences on the sense of time, the function of memory of an accumulated life experience becomes important. It was ‘‘as if it happened yesterday’’.įor extended periods of willfully induced traumatic circumstances, for example, racial persecution, concentration camp imprisonment or extended periods of physical or sexual abuse, the effect is even more powerful: the dominance of the unconscious consequences of the traumatic situation reduce the capacity for significant new investments and, with it, the loss of a generation of new experiences that otherwise would enrich the experience of passage of time. Thus, for example, a couple who were assaulted, robbed and controlled with threats to their life over a period of hours, had a grossly distorted subjective experience of extension of the duration of the event, with a post-traumatic stress disorder, fixation to the trauma over a period of many months, and a retrospective sense of shrinkage of the time after the trauma over one to three years. The long-range effect of this situation leads to a “time stood still” quality related to reverberating unconscious processes that reduce, retrospectively, the experience of time, particularly that of time lived after the traumatic experience. In the case of acute, brief situations when the trauma is the product of willful aggression, there will be an almost intolerable sense of extension of time during the traumatic experience itself, with a fixation to the trauma that, by repetitive “flashbacks”, extends the subjectively experienced duration of the trauma. Severe trauma has multiple influences on the subjective sense of time depending on the nature and duration of the traumatic experience. The opposite development characterizes traumatic experiences. Happy moments, “stellar experiences”, while seeming to pass too quickly, nonetheless build up as happy memories, creating a sense of life lived intensely, that extends the sense of duration of time across the life span. The sense of acceleration of the passing of time increases with age, and becomes a significant conscious experience in old age (Hartocollis, 1983). There is a clearer sense of what to expect in the future, and a sharp linkage between past experience and its expected repetition. The expectation of future developments, that are now more firmly embedded in consciousness by the individual’s own life trajectory, planning and task investments, matched with active work toward the transformation of such a projected future into the present, decreases the subjective experience of the duration of time so that it seems to be passing more rapidly. With developing growth and maturity, and a more predictable succession of tasks and personal investments, cycles of past experience seem to accelerate. The multitude of early experiences that bombard the infant and small child gradually settle into longer cycles between the past and the future, such as, for example, the long time in between weekends, and the endless time between birthdays, thus taking on a quality of “endless time”, the correlate to the naturally assumed permanence of childhood. Throughout the life cycle a remarkable yet gradual change occurs in the subjective experience of the duration of time. The subjective experience of the duration of time is irregular and depends on multiple psychological factors. »Īs Elliott Jaques (1982) pointed out in his overview of psychoanalytic views of the experience of time, it is important to keep in mind the difference between objective time as a scientific concept characterized by the uniformity of linear intervals as defined by the units of measurement of time, on the one hand, and the subjective sense of time, that has very different characteristics, on the other. « The failure to develop significant object relations results in a chronically empty internal world (.) that condenses, retrospectively, the experience of time (.) The narcissistic patients will often find themselves “waking up” at age 40, 50 or 60 with a desperate sense of years lost.