Counter-Time: Temporality of thought and history in clinical practice and literature

Author(s) : Marina Breccia

Part of New Library of Psychoanalysis series - more in this series

Counter-Time: Temporality of thought and history in clinical practice and literature

Book Details

  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Published : September 2026
  • Cover : Paperback
  • Pages : 284
  • Category :
    Psychoanalysis
  • Catalogue No : 98597
  • ISBN 13 : 9781041135135
  • ISBN 10 : 1041135130
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This book explores how trauma affects our experience of time, how that experience may not be linear, and how we may experience “counter-time” – a disruption or arrest of time’s flow and a perpetual return to the time of trauma.

Counter-Time explores this phenomenon in clinical practice and in examples from literature and history, including mass trauma such as genocide. Survivors of trauma can be helped to move beyond their experience by drawing on their own cultural resources, helping them to use “counter-time” as a means of release instead of a repeated traumatic symptom.

With rich clinical detail and clear, accessible writing, this book is essential reading for all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists working with trauma.

Table of Contents


1. The Shadow Zone
2. Time in Trauma
3. Rituals and Repetitions
4. Present and Current/Actual: multiple and heterogenous identity – identity denied
5. Traumatic Dislocation: Genocide A brief introduction to the link between trauma and time, and a clarification about current history
6. Life Autobiography – Death Autobiography: autobiographical time
7. Crossing Time: historical temporality in ‘Psychotic Potentiality’
8. In the ‘End’: end is termination; end as goal – Julie: or the New Héloise
9. Conclusions

About the Author(s)

Marina Breccia is a psychiatrist and training psychoanalyst at the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI) and International Psychoanalytical Association. She is also an external Professor of Psychiatry at Pisa University and foreign consultant for Revue Belge de Psychanalyse. She has written several monographs and contributed to jointly authored volumes.

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