Time-Limited Existential Therapy. Alison Strasser

      1 1 Gender‐specific references in this and other quoted material appear in the original text.

2 Core of the Wheel: Time and Self

       Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

      Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (1964)

      Source: Alison Strasser

      This chapter begins our journey through the layers, levels, sections, and segments of the Wheel. We start with the idea of time and its interaction with the ever‐changing self as the centre of our existence, symbolically represented by time and the self being located at the centre of the Wheel.

Time as the Centre of Existence

      It might be obvious that we are always in time. To live authentically, however, requires that we cultivate a particular awareness of time and its impact on us. Time cannot be considered as a solo and separate concept but as intertwined with all aspects of our being, as depicted in the Wheel of Existence. For instance, both the past and future are imbued with meaning, and events in our present life impact our understanding of our past and our future direction.

      Time can be considered in more than one way. Time as cosmological is essentially infinite. It is one of the unbounded ‘hums’ of existence. It is not mine to possess; it is its own master. In contrast, time as an entity is a social construction, formulated by society to give meaning and structure to the passage of time. In our Western world, this construction is dominated by the Gregorian calendar, the chronological clock dominated by Greenwich Mean Time and a perception that the general direction of time flows out from the past towards the present and into the future.

      For Heidegger, time was more than an entity; he considered it to be ontological (1962), contending that time is constant, it is eternal, it is cosmological and is intrinsic to being. He argued that time is not linear ‘but the past is carried along by a present that is already anticipating the future’ (Cohn, 1997, p. 14). He suggests that to live authentically requires a particular awareness of time, an understanding that being is time, that to be is to exist temporally on this path between birth and death (Heidegger, 1962).

      Beginnings are intertwined with endings. The end can be the finality associated with our physical death as well as the end of specific events such as the end of a psychotherapy session, leaving home, or quitting a job – and, of course, the ending that occurs in all relationships. This is in keeping with Heidegger’s idea that humans are thrown into the world in time and are always projected forward to the ultimate end (1962). Time is related to our innate sense of the unity of past, present, and future; it is finite, coming to an end with our death, and is also infinite in that it continues without us after we die.

Existential philosophers distinguish between the experience of living in time –which is what is known as ‘thought time’ (Binswanger, 1963, p. 301), that is, the way we are aware of time – and ‘lived’ time, which refers to our inner knowingness of the passing of time and which includes the idea of coming into being and disappearing from being. This view of time gives a different perspective to the concept of living in the Now where our recollections and view of the past can only be viewed from our present time. Time never stands still but is influenced by and continually moves between the past, present, and future dimensions. We are always in present time, but our present time is constructed out of our present perspective of the past and the future. We only access any past event, both its content and feeling, from our present perspective. So, there is no actual past, only our current interpretation of that past. And the same for the future, in that we are only imagining a future from our current emotional and physical perspective.

      For Heidegger, time is the fundamental aspect of his thesis in that we each live our lives within temporality, with the inner knowing that our lives on this planet will end. Heidegger notes this as our ‘Being‐towards‐death’ that is future directed and is unique to humans who have this capacity to transcend the present and project towards the future that is full of possibilities. ‘Every moment of change connects us to our death anxiety’ (Spinelli, 2016, p. 135), implying that living in time is not static but embedded in change. This gives us the movement of forward living with the possibility of both hope and despair.

      Time is concrete, in that we can be aware of every ticking second, grounded in the reality that the ticking is forever moving forward towards an end. Simultaneously, we can experience time as disappearing, stopping, and sometimes eternally stretched. Time is also elusive in that the past, in its detail, gets forgotten and remembered in fragments and bite‐size packages, and the future is only in our imagination, yet we often act as if it is true. ‘We measure everything in life by change and the passing of time, because we ourselves are always no longer what we were and not yet what we will be’ (van Deurzen, 2014).

      Time lies within us whatever we do or whatever happens to us. As an ontological given, time is common to us all as human beings and provides an overarching and all‐encompassing mantle over our existence.

      The location of time at the core of the Wheel is indicative of how time and temporality are essential to our existence and, as described in this book, a central component in our therapeutic work. Time is at the forefront of our minds as we formulate the contract with our clients and how we negotiate time both within and between sessions. It includes how we experience time in general and within the therapeutic frame.

      On each occasion that we sit down with a client we are at a beginning. We have no idea what the client has experienced during the week and how they will re‐enter the relationship in that beginning moment. The same is true for how the client is experiencing their entry into the therapeutic space and their meeting the therapist.

Each time we begin a session with a client, we are also facing an end.

      Maggie’s husband, after years of feeling confined by marriage and children, had decided he wanted time to find and relate to himself. Although Maggie could intellectually understand his wishes and could even contemplate her own freedom, she inwardly collapsed so that her previous routines of going to work and spending time with the children became onerous and overwhelming. Our sessions would commence with a rundown of her weekly events but soon moved to a never‐ending assortment of her thoughts. Every week, I could feel her horror when the session was over and she would have to step out of my room into the world on her own. When she was by herself, she found peace by taking a bath. The same was true when she had someone else’s total attention, someone who was absorbed in her world. In both these spaces she felt connected, so the hum of time was peaceful; it receded into the background. Conversely, in the face of endings, in having to negotiate with others or in having to think about the future, her anxiety welled up, causing her to imagine an uneasy future which would be continually disrupted; the hum of time became foregrounded and disturbing.

Self: The Secure–Insecure Continuum

      In the core of the existential Wheel, residing alongside time is the self. The phenomenological understanding of time as a shifting space applies equally to our notion of self. As is the case with time, the self is not a constant to be located but is elusive, as it shifts from moment to moment in response to each situation as it arises. As is the case with time, the self interacts with all the sections of the Wheel.

      In this version of the Wheel of Existence, time is placed at the core to denote its centrality of meaning and intent. Circling the inner core of time is the secure and insecure self that,