The term 'temporal' reverberates through the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct but interrelated axes. In phenomenological ontology, Heidegger interrogates temporality as the constitutive horizon of Dasein's being — not clock-time but the ecstatic structure of care itself, wherein 'making-present,' awaiting, and having-been mutually implicate one another. Von Franz, drawing on Jung and comparative mythology, explores temporal experience as an archetypal phenomenon: time is variously conceived as cyclical, qualitative, and saturated with cosmic meaning — a 'field' carrying the quality of coincident events rather than an abstract parameter. She contrasts Judaeo-Christian linear time (ruptured irreversibly by the Incarnation) against Chinese and Taoist time-as-qualified-continuum, and Jungian dream-structure as evidence that the unconscious organizes experience across temporal registers simultaneously. In Taoist exegesis, the 'primordial' and the 'temporal' name ontologically distinct orders: the real versus the phantasmic, inviting the practitioner to discern which domain governs each moment. Neuroscientific contributors situate temporal processing in specific cortical regions — the right hemisphere mediating 'lived time,' the temporal lobe implicated in spiritual experience, and cerebellar-parietal networks subserving motor timing deficits in ADHD. The central tension running through the corpus is between time as subjective, qualitative, and meaning-laden versus time as objective, measurable, and neurobiologically instantiated.
In the library
17 passages
The primordial is that whereby the real body is made, the temporal is that whereby the phantasmic body is made. Before the primordial and temporal are settled, the mundane and the celestial are mixed up, the real and the false are confused.
This passage establishes the Taoist ontological distinction between 'temporal' (phantasmic, conditioned existence) and 'primordial' (real, essential being), arguing that rigorous discernment of their respective domains is the foundational task of inner practice.
time comes in — because these circumstantial aspects appear in a temporal order. They vary in the course of time, being each a qualitative moment. Time in China was therefore a concrete continuum containing qualities or fundamental conditions which can be manifested relatively simultaneously in different places.
Von Franz argues that Chinese thought conceives temporal order not as an abstract frame but as a qualitatively differentiated continuum, providing the cross-cultural foundation for Jung's concept of synchronicity.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The most radical of these events, which disrupted time into a completely different Before and After, is the incarnation of Christ... the development of history is governed and oriented by a unique fact which can never be repeated.
Von Franz identifies the Incarnation as the archetypal rupture that transforms Jewish-Christian temporal experience from cyclical renewal into a uniquely directed, unrepeatable linear history.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
For 'limited' one could here also say 'timebound,' for this is one of our many limitations of which we become especially painfully aware when aging.
Von Franz, glossing Jung, equates human finitude with temporality, arguing that acknowledging one's timebound condition is the psychological ground from which a relation to the infinite becomes possible.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
In modern dreams the clock or watch sometimes has the meaning of a reminder of our temporality. Sometime before death people dream, for instance, that their watch is broken beyond repair.
Von Franz interprets the dream-image of a broken clock as a symbolic announcement of the approaching end of temporal existence, distinguishing the ego's mortality from the Self's supra-temporal continuity.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
How one can exist both in ordinary time and in aeonic time together can best be illustrated by the story of the death of the great Zen Master Ma.
Von Franz uses the Zen narrative to illustrate that depth-psychological experience involves the simultaneous inhabitation of ordinary temporal and supra-temporal (aeonic) dimensions of existence.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Yang, the Creative, 'acts in the world of the invisible with Spirit and Time for its field; Yin the Receptive acts upon Matter in Space and brings material things to completion.' Time, seen in this way, is 'the means of making actual what is potential.'
Von Franz presents the Chinese cosmological pairing of Yang/time and Yin/space as a model in which temporality is the dynamic, masculine principle by which latent potentiality is actualized in the visible world.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
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. The three arrows show the field of perception when we become aware of the dream: first perceiving the past, being hit by the present, and then seeing ahead the solution.
Von Franz proposes a model of dream-time in which the unconscious presents temporally structured content (past, present, future) simultaneously, challenging the linear conception of temporal experience.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
The sense of lived time is also a right-hemisphere-derived property, which is analogous to depth and has its own 'perspective.' 'Lived time' is not just an awareness of the fact of time... I am distinguishing this from a sense of the irreparable loss of particular individuals.
McGilchrist argues that 'lived time' — phenomenologically rich, particular, and mourning-inflected — is a right-hemisphere property distinct from the merely factual awareness of temporal mutability associated with left-hemisphere abstraction.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Time is not a given frame; it is 'produced' by the celestial revolutions (38E), which are themselves the work of the Demiurge... Time is a feature of that order, inherent in its rational structure.
The Platonic Timaeus holds that temporal order is not a pre-given container but an artifact of rational cosmic creation, generated by the Demiurge through periodic celestial motion and thus intrinsic to the intelligible structure of reality.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
It is certainly not for rational reasons, but on account of the archetypal intuition of a cyclical time (as distinct from the flux aspect) that our invention of clocks made them circular.
Von Franz contends that the circular form of clocks reflects an archetypal, pre-rational intuition of time as cyclic rather than linear, embedding cosmological symbolism in the most mundane artifacts of temporal measurement.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Fleet-ing and elusive time, made up of an indefinite succession of constantly renewed cycles, is brought at last to its conclusion, its telos, by the recollection of previous lives.
Vernant shows that in Pythagorean thought, anamnesis (recollection) transforms the otherwise endless flux of cyclical temporal experience into a teleologically completed whole, granting salvation through the re-joining of beginning and end.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Medical literature has all too frequently highlighted the temporal lobe as an area implicated in religious activity. The evidence for this is drawn from observations that temporal lobe epilepsy is characterized by religious experiences as part of the ictus.
Mohandas reviews the neuroscientific evidence linking the temporal lobe to religious and spiritual experience, noting that limbic system activation in temporal lobe epilepsy may provide a neurological substrate for states otherwise attributed to transcendence.
Mohandas, E., Neurobiology of Spirituality, 2008supporting
ADHD children have shown to have deficits in motor timing, time estimation and temporal foresight.
Hart's meta-analysis identifies temporal processing — encompassing motor timing, estimation, and foresight — as a core neurocognitive deficit in ADHD, grounding the phenomenological disruption of temporal experience in neurobiological substrates.
Hart, Heledd, Meta-analysis of fMRI studies of timing in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 2012supporting
the beyond is eternal and yet phenomenal; that it is changeless and of all time and yet full of history.
Auerbach's analysis of Dante's figural realism demonstrates how medieval Christian thought held together the eternal and the temporal, the changeless and the historically particular, within a single hermeneutic structure.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the advance of Time is not like a single straight line of unlimited extent in both directions, but limited and circumscribed.
Proclus's commentary on the Timaeus, cited here, preserves the Platonic tradition that temporal duration is not infinite linear extension but a bounded, circular measure — a position foundational for cyclical conceptions of time across the Western corpus.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside
increased activity in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus when an insight solution occurs: this same right anterior temporal area is associated with making connexions across distantly related information during comprehension.
McGilchrist notes that the right anterior superior temporal gyrus mediates both insight and broad associative comprehension, situating this region as a neural locus for the integrative, non-linear cognition he associates with right-hemisphere functioning.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside