Freud and Winnicott have expressed the opinion that if their psychoanalytic ideas are correct, then poets and writers will have thought of them first. Dominique Scarfone, who has developed the concept of “actual time” on metapsychological grounds, concurs with their opinion by showing that variants of “actual time” can be found in the works of the American poet W. S. Merwin, the British writer Virginia Woolf, and the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Their poetry, literary prose, and philosophy, respectively, are shown to resonate with the time dimension of the psychoanalytic process.

Dominique Scarfone, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (Montreal French Branches) in the process of retiring from his practice of more than 40 years. A former full professor at the Université de Montréal, he was for many years an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is presently chairing the Executive committee of the International Journal’s College. 

The author of  numerous journal articles and book chapters, he published  a number books, among which Laplanche: An introduction and The Unpast. The Actual Unconscious, both published in 2015 in New York by UIT-The Unconscious in Translation. He co-edited with Howard B. Levine and Gail Reed. Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac, 2013). A new book is in preparation : The Reality of the Message. Seduction, trauma and transference. (provisional title) to be published by UIT.

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