The term ‘moment’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several intersecting axes, none of which reduces to the merely chronometric. At one extreme, McGilchrist and Kierkegaard (cited in tandem) insist that the moment is not an atom of time but an atom of eternity — dimensionless, yet paradoxically everlasting, ‘simultaneously unmeasurably brief and everlasting, always present.’ Rudhyar extends this into an astrological metaphysics: the creative moment is the very ontological locus of the spirit, the natal chart being nothing other than the ‘symbolic structure of the moment.’ Von Franz approaches the moment from the angle of Jungian synchronicity and the numinous: certain gods — Kairos, Pan, Nike — literally personify qualitatively charged moments in which time becomes fatefully compressed. In clinical depth psychology, Ogden and Levine situate the moment as the therapeutic unit par excellence: ‘present-moment time’ is where procedural traumatic learning manifests and must be met, extended, and reworked. Kalsched, reading the Eros-Psyche myth, identifies a ‘sacrificial moment’ as a universal threshold in psychological development, the pivot around which object-relating, the depressive position, and ego-sacralization converge. Von Franz also maps the moment against Augustine’s eternity and Zen Buddhist aeonic time. Taken together, these voices articulate a field in which the moment is neither a point on a timeline nor a mere subjective impression, but the primary site where eternity impinges upon temporal existence, where psyche meets cosmos, and where therapeutic transformation becomes possible.
the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.
Drawing on Kierkegaard and Dōgen, McGilchrist argues that the moment, precisely because it has no dimensions, is not an atomistic unit of time but the point at which eternity first intersects with temporal existence.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the ‘moment’ as referred to by Eastern sages such as Dōgen is entirely without dimensions, and is thus ‘simultaneously unmeasurably brief and everlasting, always present’.
McGilchrist, citing Eastern philosophical sources, contends that the moment resists both atomistic and purely temporal categorization, being instead a paradoxical site of dimensionless but perpetual presence.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The moment operates through man’s monad and through man’s essential archetypal structure (which is his karma). That moment contains in potency the whole of the celestial pattern of planetary and spatial relationships.
Rudhyar identifies the creative moment as the ontological vehicle through which the celestial archetype is impressed upon individual selfhood, making the natal moment the irreducible basis of astrological interpretation.
There was, for instance, a god of that moment when the horses panic, or one of the right moment to gather honey. Pan was the god of that moment when panic breaks out in battle. Then there is Kairos—the god of lucky coincidences.
Von Franz demonstrates that the ancient Greeks and Romans personified qualitatively charged moments as gods, establishing a mythological precedent for the Jungian understanding of time as bearing irreducible numinous qualities.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
Almost all major psychoanalytic theorists have found in this pivotal moment a major threshold in psychological development. Winnicott called it the ‘moment of destruction’ which separates object-relating from object-use.
Kalsched identifies a singular ‘sacrificial moment’ within the Eros-Psyche myth as a cross-theoretical threshold recognized by Winnicott, Klein, Freud, and Jung, each naming it differently but all marking it as the crucible of psychological development.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis
The development of the time Sense means the development of feeling awareness of the moment and of biography different from the moment constructed by the thinking clock. Rather there is a moment as quantitatively long or short as feeling shapes it.
Von Franz and Hillman argue that the feeling function shapes temporal experience, giving moments their qualitative size and character in contrast to the homogeneous intervals measured by the clock.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis
Because the physical and mental tendencies of procedural learning manifest in present-moment time, in-the-moment trauma-related emotional reactions, thoughts, images, body sensations, and movements that emerge spontaneously in the therapy hour become the focal points of exploration and change.
Ogden establishes present-moment experience as the irreducible therapeutic unit in sensorimotor psychotherapy, arguing that traumatic procedural learning can only be transformed by engaging it as it arises in real time.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
the therapist asked her to go back to the moment in her memory when her date was beginning to make sexual advances and explore her somatic experience right then, as if she could extend the moment, making it last several minutes without moving forward in the memory.
Ogden illustrates the clinical technique of artificially extending a traumatic moment in time so that nascent but unexecuted somatic defenses can be discovered and completed, enabling new action.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
both therapist and client are mindful of the ebb and flow of the client’s present moment experience. It’s as if clients take the therapist with them into their inner world by describing their experience verbally as it unfolds rather than describing it after the immediacy of the moment passes.
Ogden describes embedded relational mindfulness as a moment-to-moment collaborative tracking in which the therapeutic relationship itself is conducted within, rather than about, the client’s present-moment experience.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
This is the moment of ‘voluntary sacrifice’ that so interested Jung. It initiates a process of humanization in which bodily pain and humiliation are experienced.
Kalsched reads Psyche’s submission to Aphrodite as a ‘moment of voluntary sacrifice’ analogous to the crucifixion, a mythological template for the ego’s surrender of inflation as the precondition for divine cooperation in development.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting
His mortal part (his moon visage) lasted only that long, but another, more archetypal part of himself was to last much longer; and beyond it there would even be an eternal kernel.
Von Franz uses the story of Zen Master Ma to illustrate that a single moment of death simultaneously belongs to ordinary time and to aeonic eternity, reflecting the Jungian distinction between temporal ego and archetypal Self.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Whenever we reach a peak moment in life, a full Moon moment when things are coming to fruition, we can be sure that there is a past which has led
Greene employs the lunar cycle as a psychological metaphor for peak moments, suggesting that culminating instants in life carry the weight of an entire developmental arc, linking the moment to cyclical time and Fortuna’s wheel.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
The ego is moving in time from the past to the future. The dream comes up toward it from the unconscious, like a wave containing a cluster of images.
Von Franz presents the dream as an encounter between the ego’s linear time and the unconscious’s clustered temporal field, with the present moment serving as the point of intersection where past, present, and future are simultaneously available.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Thy years stand together, because they do stand; nor are departing thrust out by coming years, for they pass not away… Thy To-day, is Eternity.
Augustine’s meditation on divine time frames the eternal ‘today’ as the ground against which all temporal moments are measured — a theological anticipation of the depth-psychological distinction between chronos and kairos.
, Confessions, 397supporting
The ‘events’ are shapes cut out by a finite observer from the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world.
Merleau-Ponty deconstructs the river metaphor of time to argue that events — and by extension moments — are not objective givens but perceptual constructions of an embodied, finite observer, grounding the phenomenology of the present moment.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
Every whole as a whole represents or symbolizes a quality which is the manifestation of a particular moment of Time. Time generates particulars.
Rudhyar articulates a metaphysical position in which every whole entity is the expression of a unique temporal moment, giving the concept of ‘moment’ an ontological generativity beyond mere sequentiality.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
The most radical of these events, which disrupted time into a completely different Before and After, is the incarnation of Christ.
Von Franz frames the Incarnation as the paradigmatic ‘moment’ in Judaeo-Christian theology — an unrepeatable rupture that reorients the entire temporal axis of history into a new Before and After.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
as he becomes slowly more conscious of the real reasons for the neurotic symptoms, the possibility of further consciousness and of cure slowly becomes constellated. There are a few people… who at this moment simply shed their neurotic symptoms like an old skin.
Von Franz identifies a clinical moment of breakthrough in the treatment of neurotic dissociation, where accumulated consciousness suddenly crystallizes into cure — illustrating the kairos-quality of psychotherapeutic turning points.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside