The (un)thinkable and anachronic time

Abstract

In this essay, the authors present a sequence in three parts regarding humane thinking and evasion of thinking under extreme circumstances. In the first part, thinking stems from the emotional impact, raw feelings and impressions owing to a natural disaster in south Brazil. The second part of the essay is Analytic thinking, a brief comment written by Thomas H. Ogden, where he shares five of his major principles in psychoanalysis, and arguments that psychoanalytic thinking underlies all creative thinking. And third, the authors offer thoughts concerning the concept of analytic times, proposed by Ogden (2024) in recent publication and describe a complementary mode of experience of time, which commonly takes place in the face of extreme circumstances. This is seen as reflecting the stagnation of both diachronic and synchronic time, involving active and massive avoidance of the experience of the passage of time. For this experience of dead, anti-thinking time, the authors propose the name of anachronic time.