In the April 2019 issue of History of the Human Sciences, Allegra Fryxell, from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, published ‘Psychopathologies of time‘ – a paper that opens up the tole of time both a methodological tool and a site or clinical focus in early 20th-century psychiatry. Here she talks to Rhodri Hayward about the psychopathological functions of time in this period.

Rhodri Hayward (RH): Allegra, in your article, you draw the reader’s attention to a neglected tradition in Western psychiatry which sought to explore the connections between mental disturbance and the corruption of time consciousness.  In particular, you draw attention to the work of Henri Bergson and Eugène Minkowski showing how they explored the tensions between lived time and clock time to build what you call a ‘futurist’ psychiatry.  As I understand it, this contrasts with the contemporary psychotherapies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Janet’s dynamic psychiatry.  Whereas psychoanalysis is concerned with an individual’s inability to integrate their past, and Pierre Janet’s methods that aimed to orientate consciousness toward the present, Minkowski’s followers were concerned with the idea that patients were alienated from the future.  Could you say a little more about this ‘futurist’ psychiatry and why you think it flourished in the interwar years?

Allegra Fryxell (AF): I think it is perhaps unsurprising that a ‘futurist’ approach took root in psychiatry at the same time as a variety of avant-garde movements like Italian Futurism were engaging with ideas about the future. Many historians have understood interwar Europe and North America as a period characterised by dramatic social changes following the Great War, which catalysed a discussion about the ‘shape’ of possible new futures — particularly in Europe, where the revolutions of 1917-1919 ushered in a period of political instability. The futurist emphasis of the phenomenological psychiatrists upon whom I focus in this article is a natural facet of this socio-historical context. That being said, I don’t think the history of psychiatry that I am attempting to unravel is simply an interwar phenomenon. Psychological research on time started in mid-nineteenth-century experiments on the time of responses to physical stimuli as well as memory. Interwar phenomenological psychology was in conversation with these earlier developments as well as concurrent discussions about time in philosophy and science — like Einstein’s theory of relativity or Bergson’s philosophy of duration — in which time had occupied a central place since at least the 1890s. We need only think of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) to see evidence of this temporally focused discourse in modern literature.

Indeed, ‘Time with a Capital T’ (as contemporaries wrote) was a major focal point of discussion transcending physics or philosophy in western culture. Historians have admirably uncovered some aspects of this phenomenon, including Jimena Canales’ work on ‘microtimes’ and the debate between Einstein and Bergson in 1922 (in A Tenth of a Second: A History (2009) and The Physicist and the Philosopher (2016)), or Vanessa Ogle’s masterful exploration of the uneven implementation of standardised clock time, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (2015). My own work, however, complicates the long-standing historical interest in the proliferation of clock-time and time standardisation by uncovering a deeper and far more complex debate about time across the arts and sciences. The phenomenological psychiatry that I bring to the fore here is part of a larger project in which I attempt to tease out a conception of time that challenges or resists the simple quantification of clock-time in philosophy, drama, music, and science fiction—I’m hoping to address sociology and economics, too, in the final monograph!

What I find especially interesting is how deeply this ‘time discourse’ penetrates late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century understandings of lived experience and the universe. While we tend to view ‘modern’ time in terms of relativity theory or the triumph of clock-time (tied to experiences of industrialization and now globalization or the information economy), my research suggests that a far deeper exploration of what it means to be-in-the-world was at play in this period (thus we must read the phenomenological tradition in Western psychiatry as a counterpart to intellectual approaches such as the philosophies of Edmund Husserl or Martin Heidegger). Part of my goal is therefore to bring psychiatrists such as Minkowski into discussion when considering the zeitgeist of the 1880s through the 1930s, in order to demonstrate how time was central to modernist understandings of the world—not simply in the form of ‘clock-time’ or linear ‘acceleration’, as Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, Michael O’Malley, Hartmut Rosa and others have argued. The futurity at work, then, in interwar phenomenological psychiatry is part of a broader discussion regarding the meaning of time: what is it? How do we experience it? How do temporal disorders cause illness? And what constitutes a ‘temporal disorder’? The ‘futural’ answer put forth by psychiatrists like Minkowski and Erwin Straus is not exclusively about the future—it is about integrating or orienting oneself in time towards the future, while remaining mindful of the present and in full possession of the past. It is their resolution to address all three dimensions of time that distinguishes their approach from the past-orientation of Freudian psychoanalysis or the presentist discussions of Pierre Janet.

RH: You quote Wyndham Lewis on the ‘time mind’ of the interwar public but arguably contemporary academia shares this same ‘time mind’ with a rich stream of books, special issues, conferences and seminars on temporality appearing now, as well as a formidable array of conceptual tools for addressing time (multiple modernities, chronotypes, pluritemporality, heterotemporality etc.).

AF: Most certainly! I started my doctoral research before temporality had become the current vogue in academic research, so I find the recent focus on time simultaneously surprising and enriching. As I suggested in my recent article on modern time in Past & Present, part of the attraction to time lies in the fact that the history of Western modernity has been entangled with the fetishisation of controlling or measuring time since the Enlightenment — one might therefore interpret the resurgence of time within the academy as another feature of this aspiration to define time. On the other hand, I think the ‘temporal turn’ is a natural product of the various ‘turns’ in historical research; linguistic, cultural, and particularly spatial. It makes sense that, after scholars have attempted to understand the significance ‘space’ holds in experience and theory, they have turned to its concomitant ‘time’ in seeking to understand the world. In fact, if we consider history as the discipline par excellence concerned with time, it is surprising — as Keith Moxey underscores in Visual Time: The Image in History (2013) — that historians have not questioned our epistemology of time given its centrality to our discipline and to our methodology. Working on time has made me more aware of the work that seemingly neutral labels like ‘Renaissance’, ‘early modern’ or ‘1848’ do to shape our understanding of the past. Consequently, I think the temporal turn is partly a legacy of postmodernism, encouraging us to reconsider time as a tool of historical research as well as an intrinsic part of historical experience. Everyone, after all, lives within and through time, even though our individual experiences of time are subjectively different and even though we might live within multiple simultaneous ‘time cultures’ (the religious calendars of Judaism or Islam, for example, compared to the predominantly Christian-inflected social calendars of the West; or the rhythms of semesters and birthdays, of gestation and menstruation, of childhood, ageing, and disease). If we think about the oscillation between ‘utopian’ and ‘dystopian’ views of the future in Western thought across the twentieth century, too, then the current vogue for temporality in academic research may also reflect a widespread unease or anxiety regarding the future.

RH: I’d like to come back to that idea of contemporary anxiety, but just focusing for  a moment on the growing interest in phenomenological psychiatry (in the work of Matthew Ratcliffe and Gareth Owen for instance), what role do you think that the ideas of Minkowski and Bergson have to play in psychiatry today?  I’m struck by the contrast between the current emphasis on being in the present which seems central to the contemporary mindfulness movement (see Matt Drage in HHS from last year) and to the phenomenological urge to recover a lost connection to the future.

AF: This is an excellent question, and happily I think these ideas are indeed resurfacing in psychiatry today. You are absolutely right that the mindfulness movement brings renewed attention to presence, and although it might seem ostensibly ‘presentist’, I think it harks to the same project that Minkowski et al are trying to achieve: orienting the body within time. Although mindfulness practitioners emphasise a focus on the present in meditation, mindfulness is arguably about relaxing the mind and body in order to approach the future with vitality and direction — the orientation that Minkowski and his colleagues saw lacking in individuals suffering from schizophrenia or depression. While interwar psychiatrists failed to offer a solution (unlike mindfulness practitioners), both groups are striving to understand how time shapes existence and how individuals can better relate to time in order to be healthy and successful.

As far as academic research goes, phenomenology appears to be re-entering experimental paradigms and theories in current psychology. There is a lot of recent research indicating that Minkowski’s ideas are resurfacing as alternative means of exploring psychiatric disorders, suggesting that the turn toward analytical philosophy and pharmaceutical psychiatry in the latter half of the twentieth century no longer holds validity for addressing lived experience.

RH: So on our current anxieties. You’ve drawn from people like Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog the idea that technological modernity has led to a shrinking of the present, but I wonder if there is also a political process under way.  In reading Minkowski and his colleagues’ descriptions of patients’ alienations from the future, I’m reminded of the radical claims made by critics such as Mark Fisher and Ivor Southwood that contemporary working conditions with their inbuilt precarity create a situation in which planning ahead/or imagining a future becomes impossible.  At the same time we see similar arguments being made around the triumph of neo-liberalism (which is seen as obscuring the possibility of a radical future) and environmental degradation (which is seen as robbing us of any future at all).

AF: Undoubtedly. In fact, I would say that most histories of time focus on power and time or technology and time, thus reinforcing an emphasis on the ‘compression’ of the present and the ‘acceleration’ toward the future that is understood to be central to modernity. It has been shown that precarity — whether financial or otherwise — can halt or stymy consideration of longer durations like the future. Researchers have proven, for example, that individuals who live in poverty find it difficult to save money because they cannot adequately conceive of the future when they are focusing on making enough money to survive a 24-hour-cycle or having enough to eat (psychologist Eldar Shafir calls the cognitive effects of scarcity ‘bandwidth poverty’, and economist Sendhil Mullainathan locates the same bias in busy professionals whose stress limits effective time management). The conclusions that Minkowski and his colleagues drew from their research in the 1920s and 1930s indicate that any number of stressors can prohibit an individual from achieving ‘syntony’, their word for the temporal integration of conceptions of the past, present, and future requisite for an active and healthy life that scientists are now starting to understand as impairments in neurocognitive function. They also underscored how an inability to synchronise the time of individual experience with the tempo of social life (much as Bergson suggested the need to synchronise duration within the social fabric of daily life his philosophical writings on duration) prohibits healthy existence. If there is one lesson to be learned from this research, it is that experiences of trauma or stress — including the stressors of living within authoritarian regimes, extreme neoliberal societies, or environmental catastrophes — can have a profound impact on individual syntony. Indeed, one of my students has recently finished a dissertation on the intrinsic relationship between the pathologisation of anxiety and the rise of neoliberalism since the 1960s.

RH:  I guess the strong claim that you — and your students — are making about the relationship between social organisation and the experience of time raises a larger question around the writing of history — a question you’ve already touched upon in your reference to Keith Moxey.  If our conception of temporality is based upon a particular culture or economic structure then how might the writing of history — and the history of the human sciences — be done differently?

AF:  If we accept François Hartog’s claim that the relationship between past, present, and future determines the configurations of possible histories, then the temporal assumptions of our own culture significantly condition the possibilities of writing history in the present. When approaching my own period (roughly 1880 to 1940), attentiveness to the radically different relationship between past, present, and future has led me to interpret the seemingly ‘anachronistic’ juxtapositions of historical eras in modernist literature, for example, as a serious gesture – one that moreover resonates with the religious revivals of the nineteenth century or beliefs in the afterlife in Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism and occultism, such as theosophy. It also shifts the epistemological foundations of fields like archaeology, as my work on popular Egyptomania in British culture elucidates and offers new insight for understanding the relationship between explorations of multiverses in geometry and physics (the fourth dimension, relativity’s space-time, etc.).

Overall, the connections that are newly underscored by attending to the temporal assumptions at work in a given historical moment offer us new ways of understanding seemingly transformative moments (such as the development of relativity theory) within longer-term cultural perspectives that do not always ‘fit’ into existing paradigms (such as the surge in spiritualism following the Great War alongside the secularisation thesis). It also compels us to read our own histories in a different light. I wonder, for example, whether the determination to find examples of schisms or ruptures between epochs (like the First World War) or experiences of ‘acceleration’ in the nineteenth century – when the majority of Europeans and North Americans did not have access to new technologies like the telegraph until much later in the century – is tied to globalization and the rise of cybernetics, and thus rather more reflective of our own time culture and social anxieties.

Having said that, I suspect that I am skirting around your question rather than directly resolving it. The temporal turn behoves us to evaluate past histories from the perspective of that culture’s specific temporal assumptions and attend to how past time cultures shaped the possibilities of existence. The latter includes belief systems including science, experience of childhood and ageing, models of the body and society, and perspectives on past and future. Given the centrality of time to human experience, I think the human sciences in particular can benefit from a temporal approach to understand its disciplinary histories.

Allegra R.P Fryxell is a Trebilcock-Newton Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is a cultural historian of modern Europe, focusing on the interactions between the arts and sciences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and America.

Rhodri Hayward is Reader in History at Queen Mary University of London, and an editor at HHS.