The term ‘present’ occupies a peculiarly contested position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as phenomenological ground, temporal paradox, therapeutic locus, and metaphysical problem. No single tradition settles its meaning. For Heidegger, the present carries its own ecstasy—an enigmatic thickness out of which phenomena emerge and into which they withdraw, a presencing that never collapses into simple instantaneity. Augustine’s confessional analysis discovers that only the present strictly ‘is,’ yet finds it equally elusive, held only by the attention of a conscious subject. Merleau-Ponty and Bergson, mediated through McGilchrist, insist on a ‘present which endures’—a living present torn between past retention and future projection, constitutively open and never punctual. Hadot and the Stoic tradition, particularly through Marcus Aurelius, treat the present as an ethical exercise: to circumscribe, intensify, and inhabit the durable present moment is itself a spiritual practice of freedom. Simondon gives the present an individuating function—it is simultaneously individual and milieu, the soul’s active interface between a past it has created and a future it anticipates. Derrida, following Valéry, radically contests the very possibility of a self-present origin, showing that the ‘implex’ structure of the present always envelops the non-present. Trauma theory in van der Hart and Ogden reconceives the present therapeutically, as the site of ‘presentification’—the integrative act that grounds adaptive selfhood. The tensions between these positions—presence as fullness versus presence as irreducible complexity, the present as ethical resource versus ontological impossibility—constitute the generative core of this entry.
even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. As though, paradoxically, there is a modali
Drawing on Heidegger, Abram argues that the present is not a static instant but a site of continuous emergence and withdrawal, harboring its own hidden ecstasy and depth.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
A present without a future, or an eternal present, is precisely the definition of death; the living present is torn between a past which it takes up and a future which it projects.
Merleau-Ponty defines the living present as constitutively temporal—open, intentional, and structured by retention and protention rather than by punctual self-identity.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
what we have is a present which endures. Compare the physicist Erwin Schrödinger: ‘the present is the only thing that has no end.’
McGilchrist, via Bergson and Schrödinger, argues for a present that is perpetually moving yet indivisible—a durable melody of consciousness rather than a series of discrete instants.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the impossibility for a present, for the presence of a present, to present itself as a source: simple, actual, punctual, instantaneous. The implex is a complex of the present always enveloping the nonpresent and the other present
Derrida, via Valéry’s ‘implex,’ demonstrates that the present can never be a simple, self-identical source, for it is always already complicated by the non-present and the other.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Who will tell me that there are not three times, past, present, and future; but present only, because those two are not?
Augustine’s confessional interrogation collapses past and future into the present as the sole mode of being, yet renders even this present a paradox dependent on the mind’s attention.
, Confessions, 397thesis
Le présent n’a donc de réalité que par rapport à ma conscience, à ma pensée, à mon initiative, à ma liberté, qui lui donnent une épaisseur, une durée
Hadot shows that for Marcus Aurelius, via Chrysippus, the present acquires reality and ‘thickness’ only through the subject’s conscious attention, moral intention, and freedom—making present-circumscription a central Stoic exercise.
, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 1995thesis
C’est toujours de ce présent duratif, de ce présent qui a une épaisseur, que parle Marc Aurèle. C’est dans ce présent que se situe évidemment la représentation que j’ai en ce moment
Hadot confirms in a parallel text that Marcus Aurelius consistently invokes a ‘durable present’ possessing thickness, within which representation, desire, and action are located.
, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 2002supporting
By letting past and future dissolve into the present moment, I have opened the way for their gradual rediscovery—no longer as autonomous, mental realms, but now as aspects of the corporeal present
Abram argues that the sensorial present does not abolish past and future but reveals them as dimensions of embodied experience rather than autonomous mental constructs.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
we must engage in presentification to adapt and evolve and to achieve a complex balance between stability and flexibility within our personality.
Van der Hart identifies ‘presentification’ as the essential integrative action by which the psyche grasps present reality, locating failures of this capacity at the core of traumatic dissociation.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
It is about knowing how our interoceptive and exteroceptive present, our perceived internal and external world, is embedded in our past and future.
Van der Hart elaborates that core and extended presentification together constitute autobiographical selfhood, embedding the present within temporal continuity.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
The present of the being is thus simultaneously individual and milieu; it is individual relative to the future and milieu relative to the past; the soul, the active essence of the present, is both individual and milieu.
Simondon gives the present an ontological function within individuation: it is the psychic interface where the being is both singularized against the future and relationally embedded in the past.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
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 temporal passage from present to past is not annihilation but a structural transformation retaining the genesis of each moment within subsequent presents.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
Chrysippus, wishing to be skilful in the division, says… that the part of time which is past and the part which is future subsist but do not belong and only the present belongs.
Long and Sedley document Chrysippus’s paradoxical Stoic claim that only the present ‘belongs’ to the agent, while past and future merely ‘subsist,’ yet even the present is divisible into future and past parts.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis
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; but Thou art the Same, and Thy years fail not.
Augustine contrasts the divine ‘ever-present eternity’—a timeless Today in which all times coexist—with creaturely time in which present moments pass away.
, Confessions, 397supporting
treatment must address the here-and-now experience of the traumatic past, rather than its content or narrative, in order to challenge and transform procedural learning. Because the physical and mental tendencies of procedural learning manifest in present-moment time
Ogden argues that therapeutic change requires working with the present-moment manifestation of traumatic procedural learning, not merely its narrative reconstruction.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
The Present of anxiety holds the moment of vision at the ready; as such a moment it itself, and only itself, is possible.
Heidegger identifies the authentic Present of anxiety as the ‘moment of vision’ (Augenblick) in which Dasein is gathered into the possibility of resolute self-understanding.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
‘Being’ is synonymous with permanence in presence. In this way, therefore, i.e. in the spontaneous comprehension of Being, temporal determinations are accumulated.
Derrida, citing Heidegger, traces how Western metaphysics has consistently understood Being as presence and permanence, a conflation whose temporal assumptions remain unexamined.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
to be (einai) is only participation of being in present time, and to have been is the participation of being at a past time, and to be about to be is the participation of being at a future time.
Plato’s Parmenides grounds temporal ontology in participation: being-in-the-present, being-in-the-past, and being-in-the-future are structurally differentiated modes of the One’s temporal existence.
, Parmenides, -370supporting
a preserved perception is a perception, it continues to exist, it persists in the present, and it does not open behind it onto a past event
Merleau-Ponty argues that memory cannot be explained by preserved traces, since any preserved perception remains present and cannot of itself point backward to a genuinely past event.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
memory is what creates the past for the being, in the same way that the imagination creates
Simondon argues that memory and imagination are not mere faculties but the psychic operations that actively constitute past and future as dimensions of temporal existence.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
la vie n’est faite que d’une suite d’instants, que nous vivons successivement, et que l’on peut maîtriser d’autant plus que l’on sait les définir et les isoler exactement.
Hadot elaborates the Stoic-Marcusian discipline of defining and isolating instants as a practical strategy for mastering life’s sequence, undergirding the broader ethics of present-circumscription.
, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 1995aside
Chrysippus located the movement and existence of everything in time… Time is infinite in extension and infinitely divisible.
Long and Sedley situate the Stoic treatment of the present within a broader cosmological framework in which time is infinite yet divisible, complicating the ontological status of any present moment.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987aside