The term ‘past’ occupies an unusually contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as the object of therapeutic excavation, the ground of determinism, the site of reconstitution, and a philosophically unstable dimension of lived time. Freud’s uncompromising determinism — the past as sovereign cause of present suffering — generates what Yalom identifies as ‘the seeds of therapeutic despair’: if the past fully determines the present, transformation becomes conceptually incoherent. Against this, existential and phenomenological voices insist that the past does not simply cause the present but is itself constituted by the present subject standing against a horizon of futurity. Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that the past cannot be stored as a mere trace; it must be actively held in a living subject who already carries a sense of temporality. Augustine’s meditation on time as a distension of the soul anticipates this: only the present is real, and ‘past’ names a present act of memory. Bergson and McGilchrist push further, arguing that the brain’s primary function is not to remember but to abolish memory — the past ‘endures’ in a perpetual present. Rothschild introduces a practical clinical tension: the past, being ontologically stable (‘what happened, happened’), may be overvalued as therapeutic terrain relative to present and future functioning. EMDR’s Shapiro proposes liberation from the past as the explicit therapeutic goal. Von Franz, reading through dream structure, maps past, present, and future onto dramatic phases of the unconscious communication itself, giving the past a prospective as well as retrospective significance.
if we are fully determined by the past, whence comes the ability to change? … The past, moreover, no more determines the present and the future than it is determined by them.
Yalom identifies a fundamental therapeutic paradox in deterministic theories of the past and argues that the past is itself reconstituted by present self-understanding, dissolving the asymmetry between cause and effect across time.
, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008thesis
the past is stable. What happened, happened. No matter what we do in therapy — or even on an esoteric or spiritual level — no one can change history. How it is remembered,
Rothschild argues that the ontological immutability of the past should prompt clinical reassessment of trauma therapy’s heavy emphasis on historical reconstruction at the expense of present and future functioning.
, The body remembers Volume 2, Revolutionizing trauma, 2024thesis
traces in themselves do not refer to the past: they are present … I derive my sense of the past from elsewhere, because I carry this particular significance within myself.
Merleau-Ponty argues that the past cannot be constituted by material or psychic traces alone; it requires an active temporal intentionality in the subject who already possesses a sense of the past as such.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
what is in need of explanation is not memory, but its ‘apparent abolition’ … According to Merleau-Ponty, a past and a future spring forth when I reach out towards them.
McGilchrist, drawing on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, inverts the standard question: rather than asking why we remember the past, he asks why the brain suppresses it, framing the past as enduringly present until actively abolished.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
include in an undivided present the entire past history of the conscious person … a perpetual present, although this perpetuity has nothing in common with immutability … What we have is a present which endures.
This passage deploys Bergson’s concept of ‘a present which endures’ to argue that the past is not a receding dimension but an ever-moving constituent of an indivisible temporal whole.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
past, which now are not, or the future, which are not yet, who can measure? unless a man shall presume to say, that can be measured, which is not.
Augustine establishes the classical formulation that past and future have no independent existence and can be measured only as they are retained and anticipated in the living present of the mind.
, Confessions, 397thesis
It is not then themselves, which now are not, that I measure, but something in my memory, which there remains fixed. It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times.
Augustine concludes that temporal measurement of the past occurs entirely within the mind’s own impressions, founding a phenomenological tradition in which the past is a mode of present mental life.
, Confessions, 397supporting
Most existential therapists tend to focus less on the past than do therapists of other persuasions … When existential therapists deal with guilt, it is not for the bad choices made but for the refusal to make new ones.
Yalom articulates the existential clinical stance, in which the therapeutic centre of gravity shifts from past determination to future possibility, reframing guilt as a forward-oriented rather than backward-oriented phenomenon.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
memory is what creates the past for the being, in the same way that the imagination creates … it is only after the fact that one can speak of past and future for memory and imagination.
Simondon proposes that memory does not retrieve a pre-existing past but constitutes temporality itself, paralleling imagination’s forward-creation of futurity, both being functions of the psyche’s ongoing individuation.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
the first two parts of dreams deal more with the past, the peripeties with the present, and the last part with the future … The ego is moving in time from the past to the future.
Von Franz maps the tripartite temporal structure — past, present, future — onto the dramatic architecture of dreams, suggesting that the unconscious communicates in a time-oriented narrative that mirrors the dreamer’s existential situation.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
people who have been locked in, and suffering from trauma, often for decades. Getting Past Your Past is a wonderful place to begin to understand how mental healing can occur
Shapiro frames EMDR’s therapeutic goal explicitly as liberation from the past’s grip, presenting the past as a pathological fixation from which the nervous system can be methodically freed.
, Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, 2012supporting
when the latter comes into being and pushes C into the past, C is not suddenly bereft of its being; its disintegration is for ever the inverse or the consequence of its coming to maturity.
Merleau-Ponty shows that the movement of present experience into the past is not an annihilation but a structural transformation preserving genetic continuity, making the past an ongoing dimension of temporal becoming.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
Time is ecstatic in that it opens us outward … Each of time’s ecstasies carries us, Heidegger says, toward a particular ‘horizon.’
Abram, following Heidegger, frames each temporal dimension — including the past — as an ecstatic opening toward a horizon, situating the past within a relational structure of perception and landscape rather than a repository of fixed events.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past.
Augustine contrasts the divine eternal present, which contains all past and future without succession, with human temporality, in which past and future are real only as modes of a fleeting present.
, Confessions, 397supporting
Dasein’s inauthentic historicality lies in that which under the title of ‘everydayness’ we have looked upon … as the horizon that is closest to us.
Heidegger grounds historical existence in Dasein’s care-structure, distinguishing authentic from inauthentic modes of relating to one’s past as constitutive of historicality rather than mere retrospection.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
In dual awareness, he noticed his impulse to tighten up and ‘shield my heart’ when he saw the image … Darius deliberately softened his chest to inhibit his usual pattern of detaching from his emotions.
Ogden demonstrates clinically how somatic dual awareness enables access to past emotional states without retraumatisation, treating the past as somatically encoded and requiring embodied rather than solely narrative processing.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
if you are easily triggered by reminders of your past, if you want to increase your confidence in your abilities … Phase 1 is the place to start.
Ogden positions vulnerability to past triggers as the clinical indicator for foundational resourcing work, treating the past’s intrusive presence as a somatic-regulatory problem requiring phase-based intervention.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015aside
if one’s life has value, it does not matter where it belongs in the past–present–future scale.
Sorabji invokes a pseudo-Lucretian argument to suggest that the evaluative weight we assign to the past versus the future is philosophically arbitrary, with implications for how fear of death and non-existence are emotionally processed.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000aside
what we mean ordinarily by the man is not his inner self, but only a sum of apparent continuous movement of consciousness and energy in past, present and future to which we give this name.
Aurobindo situates the ordinary sense of personal identity as a temporal stream — past, present, and future — that is mistaken for the inner self, gesturing toward a transpersonal view in which the past is one thread of a larger conscious movement.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside