Time stands among the most contested and generative terms in the depth-psychology corpus, traversing cosmological, phenomenological, psychological, and mythological registers in ways that resist any single definition. The range of positions is remarkable: Augustine meditates on divine eternity as the ground against which creaturely time dissolves into paradox; Plato, via the Timaeus, identifies time as a moving image of eternity produced by celestial revolution; Heidegger makes temporality the very meaning of Dasein, insisting that the subject and time are structurally identical. Von Franz surveys an extraordinary breadth of cultural material — Greek, Chinese, Aztec, Judeo-Christian, modern physical — to argue that time was originally experienced as living, qualitatively differentiated, and inseparable from mythological and archetypal significance, only later reduced to an abstract parameter. McGilchrist, drawing on neuropsychiatry and philosophy alike, advances the thesis that time is foundational to all existence and that the Western temptation to 'think it away' in favour of timeless truths is a catastrophic left-hemisphere distortion, nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in the temporal disintegration observed in schizophrenia. The central tension throughout is between quantitative, homogeneous clock-time and qualitative, lived, or sacred time — a tension that connects the phenomenological tradition to Jungian depth psychology, comparative religion, and contemporary neuroscience.
In the library
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time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology … Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature.
McGilchrist argues that time is ontologically foundational to all existence and that the Western privileging of timeless over temporal realities constitutes a two-thousand-year philosophical error rooted in left-hemisphere thinking.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the sense, the point, the very meaning of Dasein (each existing human being) is temporality … 'the meaning of human being is being with time'.
Drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, McGilchrist argues that time is not an external constraint on human existence but its constitutive core, inseparable from consciousness itself.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The experience of lived time, the change that comes over personal time, appears to be at the core of the syndrome [of schizophrenia] … No longer able to avail themselves of the integrating power of time, patients arrive at a condition of 'morbid dualism'.
Phenomenological psychiatry demonstrates clinically that the breakdown of lived temporal experience is central to psychotic disintegration, supporting the claim that time is structurally constitutive of embodied selfhood.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
In man's original point of view time was life itself and its divine mystery. … The Greeks actually identified time with the divine river Oceanos … called Chronos (Time) and later identified with Kronos, the father of Zeus, and also with the god Aion.
Von Franz traces the archaic identification of time with living, divine generative power, showing that the depersonalisation of time into abstract measurement represents a drastic impoverishment of an originally numinous concept.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
Time in it is a 'field' which imparts to all things which coincide within it a definite quality … time never became an abstract parameter or empty frame of reference but was always qualified by the coincidence of the events which all meet at certain of its moments.
Von Franz, drawing on Chinese cosmology and the I Ching, articulates a qualitative conception of time as a meaningful field in which coincident events share intrinsic character — the conceptual basis for Jung's synchronicity.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it demanded, what Thou then didst? For there was no 'then,' when there was no time … Thy years are one day; and Thy day is not daily, but To-day … Thy To-day, is Eternity.
Augustine establishes the classical theological position that time is a creaturely reality coeval with the cosmos, contrasting the mutability of human time with the unchanging divine eternal present.
The closer we get to the outer ring, the more we come into the realm of time … In the center is the empty hub of the wheel, a realm of pure not-time.
Von Franz maps the psyche as concentric layers from ego-time at the periphery to a timeless core in the Self, proposing a depth-psychological topology in which temporal experience diminishes as one approaches the archetypal centre.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
The most radical of these events, which disrupted time into a completely different Before and After, is the incarnation of Christ … Christ died but once for our sins, once and for all (hapax, semel).
Von Franz contrasts cyclic mythological time with the Judeo-Christian linear-historical model, in which a singular irreversible event ruptures temporal continuity and orients consciousness toward an eschatological future.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
sacred time is reversible in the sense that properly speaking it is a primordial mythical time made present … it does not 'pass,' … it neither changes nor is exhausted.
Eliade distinguishes sacred from profane time, arguing that religious ritual re-actualises primordial mythical time, which is ontologically different from the irreversible linear flow of everyday temporal experience.
Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
To think away time and space is completely impossible, while it is very easy to think away everything that appears in them … Asking humans about time is like asking fish about water.
McGilchrist, citing Schopenhauer, frames time as the unavoidable ground of existence whose very ubiquity renders it invisible, motivating the chapter's phenomenological inquiry into temporal experience.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
time is seen as an aspect of the dynamic, creative basic principle of the universe … Yang, the Creative, 'acts in the world of the invisible with Spirit and Time for its field' … Time, seen in this way, is 'the means of making actual what is potential.'
Von Franz presents the Chinese cosmological association of time with the Yang principle as evidence that archaic traditions understood time as the actualising power through which potentiality becomes manifest reality.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Every change of coordinate systems mixes space and time in a mathematically defined way. Space and time are thus inseparably connected and form a four-dimensional continuum.
Von Franz situates Einstein's space-time continuum as a modern scientific confirmation of ancient intuitions — such as the Aztec god Ometéotl — that space and time are co-arising and inseparable.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
the concept of time gets mixed up with energy concepts … Bergson has this idea in his durée créatrice, which is really the Neoplatonic idea of Chronos as a god of energy, light, fire, phallic power, and time.
Jung connects mythological Chronos to Bergson's creative duration and Neoplatonic energy concepts, demonstrating the archetypal conflation of time with generative vital force across cultural traditions.
Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
'Omnia mutantur,' wrote Ovid in the Metamorphoses, 'nihil interit' – 'all things change, but nothing perishes.' … Even the process of apparent destruction is merely part of the flow of creation.
McGilchrist, drawing on Ovid, Aristotle, and Hegel, argues that time is fundamentally creative rather than merely destructive, since the flow of transformation constitutes the life of the whole without annihilating what has been.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Not only did the Maya consider time as a deity (the sun god) but every year, month, day and even hour was identical with a number and was at the same time a god.
Von Franz documents Mayan and Aztec calendrical cosmologies in which time is simultaneously numerical, divine, and qualitatively differentiated, further evidence for a universal archetypal experience of time as sacred.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
what do we measure, if not time in some space? … My soul is on fire to know this most intricate enigma.
Augustine's aporia concerning the measurement of time — past is gone, future has not arrived, and the present has no extension — prefigures modern phenomenological analyses of time-consciousness.
Time is not a given frame; it is 'produced' by the celestial revolutions … Time is a feature of that order, inherent in its rational structure.
The Timaeus presents time as a rational artifact of the Demiurge, produced by and inseparable from the orderly circular movement of the heavens, not a pre-existing container.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
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 … His mortal part (his moon visage) lasted only that long, but another, more archetypal part of himself was to last much longer.
Von Franz uses the Zen narrative of Master Ma's death to illustrate the depth-psychological thesis that the psyche simultaneously inhabits ordinary clock-time and a deeper aeonic temporality.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
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 connects Jung's insight about finitude and the infinite to temporal experience, proposing that conscious acceptance of being time-bound is a condition for genuine encounter with the Self.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
because nows are not 'at the same time,' as are points … time, as the numbered number of movement, is not intrinsically of an arithmetic nature.
Derrida, glossing Aristotle's Physics, identifies the aporia that prevents time from being simply identified with the mathematical line or discrete number, placing the now in an undecidable relation to movement and succession.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Time in it is a 'field' which imparts to all things which coincide within it a definite quality. It mediates, as the Hopi see so clearly, between the possible and the actual meaningful chance-event.
Von Franz draws on Hopi cosmology to articulate time as a qualitative mediating field between potentiality and actualisation, which grounds the synchronicity concept in cross-cultural parallels.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
establishing the sense of a wholly objective, quantitative time impervious to the particular rhythms of different locales and seasons. The voice of this objective time was the implacable 'tick-tock' of the clock's internal mechanism.
Abram traces the cultural-historical imposition of homogeneous clock-time over locally differentiated temporal rhythms, aligning with von Franz's critique of abstract clock-time as a civilisational impoverishment.
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside
The Europeans had something they called Time. They used it to give them their power. So Mink decided he would steal Time.
This indigenous narrative frames clock-time as an instrument of colonial power, underscoring the ideological and dominating functions of the Western temporal regime that depth-psychological authors contest.
Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994aside
Every form of life appears to us as a Gestalt with a specific development in time as well as space … This basically rhythmic structure of our physiological life is not its only relation to time.
Von Franz draws on biology and ethology to show that living organisms embody intrinsic temporal rhythms, supporting the claim that time is not an external frame but a constitutive dimension of life itself.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside