On Flirtation by Adam Philips
People come to psychoanalysis when there is something they cannot forget, something they cannot stop telling themselves, often by their actions, about their lives. And these dismaying repetitions—this unconscious limiting or coercion of the repertoire of life stories—create the illusion of time having stopped (or rather, people believe—behave as if—they have stopped time). In our repetitions we seem to be staying away from the future, keeping it at bay… For Freud these repetitions are the consequence of a failure to remember…. Whatever cannot be transformed, psychically processed, reiterates itself. A trauma is whatever there is in a person’s experience that resists useful redescription. Traumas, like beliefs, are ways of stopping time.
