The duration of suffering: is 10 years more than 10 days?

Not for the unconscious! Suffering is not determined by a unit of measurement. For example, the pain of losing someone can last months or decades; sometimes weeks feel like years. In reality, great suffering can arise from the attempt to impose what would be a "correct" deadline. If you exceed this deadline and "can't overcome" it within the expected time, should you feel weak, guilty, wrong, or maladjusted because of it? Freud already spoke of the unconscious as atemporal, making it impossible to determine the duration of a pain. This illusion of a "right time" can even be very dangerous, creating an imaginary line between what is "normal" and what is "pathological." The unconscious has no clock, and grief has no calendar.

“In its fundamental postulate, that is, the unconscious as a specific functioning system of the psyche, what is most marked is that the unconscious is atemporal. Freud himself, in some texts, stated some theses about time in a slightly different way, but which can be summarized as follows, according to Gondar (1995):

1. Unconscious mental processes are not ordered temporally.

2. Time in no way alters them.

3. The idea of time cannot be applied to them.”

   
   

PIMENTA, Arlindo Carlos. O tempo em Freud. Estud. psicanal.,  Belo Horizonte ,  n. 41, p. 59-66,  jul.  2014

Lacan works with this notion of the atemporality of the unconscious through different paths. One of them is the topological path. But why resort to topology to think about the unconscious? Alfredo presents five characteristics of topology that could justify this recourse:

• topology ignores form (in psychoanalysis, forms do not fulfill a determining function, which is why the imaginary cannot be in a determining position in what is chosen to represent the structure);

• no function of measurable size or distance is taken into account;

• there is a new relationship between inside and outside;

• topology subverts the subject/object relationship;

• topology operates with the notion of invariants. Invariants are the structural properties. Everything dissolves (distance, form, size...), except the invariants—that is, the structure remains.

Leonora Carrington, The Giantess, 1950

That said, topology is a mathematical science that will be one of the central resources in Lacan's teachings, to which he resorts to avoid the illusions of comprehension, imaginary senses, and misunderstandings to which language and explanations with words are subjected. After all, what can be more "exact" than mathematics, its formulas, and graphs? The meaning of words, phrases, and narratives is not at all exact; they are ambiguous and can be signified differently by each person... Manga, manga... Fruit, a piece of clothing. In the same way, time takes on a subjective meaning, and the processes of suffering cannot be predetermined. It is precisely this absence of measurable size or distance that places us in front of an intimate love kilometers away, a pain today that dates back 8 years, an immeasurable grief. Hence, the analyst directs the treatment supported by topological, structural resources—for if it were not so, dates and quantities (intensity) would be universal benchmarks for a cure.

Here, the idea is simple but audacious in a historical moment of pathologization and universalization of categories of suffering (the DSM, for example): for psychoanalysis, each subject articulates their suffering in their own way.