Opening Kairos inside Chronos
(paper accepted for print in 2026 Daseinsanalyse Yearbook)
Rafi Miętkiewicz
“The gardener who works beneath my window is an admirer of the world. He does not imagine that he could produce some new plant. He cultivates. In other words, he helps what already exists to grow, without claiming to create something else . . . Hence the wonder that seizes him in the morning, when he contemplates the work in which he participates. He does not contemplate it as a spectator seated in a theater. For he is not watching a play performed before him, but an opus in which he takes part. His task is not to invent a world, but to accompany the existing world . . . for he feels himself smaller than the world around him, and always he admires it, because he is neither its inventor nor its sovereign—at most the ruler of a random and largely unknown kingdom. He finds himself clumsy before an order that precedes him, fragile before countless mysteries, and first among them, the prodigious mystery of his own freedom, compelled to remain intelligent and prudent. Constantly he feels surpassed: yet he experiences no shame or bitterness from this, but rather a dignity of belonging. He has inherited a world already begun, initiated, but unfinished. He continues it, beautifies it, civilizes it. Gardeners are people who love the world. But they must still manage to re-enchant it, since it has been entirely disenchanted by the demiurges.”[1]
Introduction
The nature of time and the way human beings experience it has long haunted philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. Yet, as Heidegger insists, tradition did not recognize time as the horizon of Being itself. From Aristotle through Augustine to Kant, time was understood cosmologically, psychologically, or transcendently — but never in its existential sense, where temporality is implicated in Dasein. Being and Time was written, in part, to remedy this absence. For Aristotle, time was defined as the number of movements according to before and after, a measure of change that ordered the cosmos. For Augustine, it revealed itself in the depths of the soul, as distentio animi, the stretching of mind between past, present, and future. Kant would later argue that time, along with space, is an a priori form of sensibility, the transcendental condition that makes experience possible.
Yet none of these accounts grasped what Heidegger takes to be decisive: time not as cosmic measure, inner flow, or transcendental form, but as temporality—the very structure of Dasein’s existence. Heidegger does not radicalize a trajectory already underway; rather, he interrupts it. Being and Time posits that the sense of Sein, and its da, can only be understood through the temporal constitution of existence itself. Time is not a neutral container for beings, but the condition of disclosure by which Being comes to presence at all.
First, in SZ, §65, he describes Zeitlichkeit, the temporality of Dasein itself. Temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling, that is, the structural whole of care. Future, having-been, and present are not successive points but the ecstases of an “outside-of-itself.” Temporality is not something that emerges within time; it is that from which time arises.
“Temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling—that is, the unity of the structural whole of care. Temporality is the primordial ‘outside-of-itself’ in and for itself. We therefore call the phenomena of future, having-been, and present the ecstases of temporality. Temporality is not, prior to all this, a being which first emerges. It is not in time, but rather is that from which time arises.”[2]
Second, in §45, Heidegger turns to Temporalität, time as the horizon of the understanding of Being. Here the time is not only the condition of human existence but of ontology itself: the horizon in and through which Being comes into view. It is for this reason that the analysis of Dasein’s temporality becomes the path toward the fundamental question of the meaning of Being.
“Time must be brought to light and genuinely conceived as the horizon for all understanding of being and for any way of interpreting it. The explication of time as the horizon of the understanding of being is accordingly the aim of our fundamental analysis of Dasein.”[3]
From the early phenomenological explorations of Eugène Minkowski, who described depression as a collapse of lived time and schizophrenia as a radical distortion of temporal flow, to contemporary accounts of trauma as a freezing of temporal continuity, the experience of time is inseparable from the experience of psychic suffering. People coming for help do not simply report symptoms; they experience time as narrowed, broken, or oppressive. To listen therapeutically is therefore also to listen to how time is lived.
Minkowski, drawing on Bergson (whom Heidegger dismisses along with Aristotle and Augustine), emphasized the vital rhythm of temporality: the élan vital that allows a person to project themselves into the future, to anticipate, to hope. When this rhythm falters, life itself feels suspended. Phenomenological psychiatry after Jaspers, Binswanger, and Straus showed in turn that suffering often appears most clearly as a transformation of time: in melancholia, the future horizon collapses; in mania, it bursts uncontrollably forward; in anxiety, the present swells unbearably.
Therapy, then, is not about addressing thoughts, behaviors, or even emotions. It is about reawakening the capacity to dwell in time in a more open way. The therapeutic process is always temporal: it unfolds in chronometric time in sessions, in weeks and years, but also in fragile instants when change becomes possible. To explore daseinanalysis is to inquire into how different modes of time are lived, and how liberation may mean a reorientation toward temporality itself.
It is within this broader reflection that I wish to turn to the ancient distinction between Chronos and Kairos, which helps to articulate how therapy navigates between measured time and the sudden, transformative moment.
Chronos and Kairos
This distinction may be clarified as follows:
- Chronos: linear, quantitative time — the measured flow of minutes, hours, days. Therapy is usually bound to it: 45 to 50 minutes, weekly/biweekly sessions, calendars, schedules. Chronos is the time of the clock and the calendar, the necessary framework that ensures continuity, regularity, and structure. Without Chronos, no therapeutic process could be sustained, as it would lack consistency and order. It is the dimension of time that disciplines the encounter, makes appointments possible, and allows therapy to unfold as an ongoing process rather than a single isolated moment. Chronos is sometimes experienced as oppressive or burdensome — the ticking away of days and years, the constant reminder of mortality — yet some say it is also what makes human projects, commitments, and growth possible.
- Kairos: qualitative, opportune time — the “right moment,” the rupture or opening where something decisive may occur. Kairos is not counted but lived; it is the sudden arrival of the meaningful moment, the instant in which a possibility breaks open, and existence reveals itself in a new way. In Greek thought, Kairos was often personified as a fleeting youth, with wings on his feet and a forelock of hair hanging over his forehead — to signify that one must grasp him as he comes, for once he has passed, he cannot be seized again. In the New Testament, Kairos carries the sense of “fulfilled time” or the moment of grace:
πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρός, καὶ ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ· μετανοεῖτε καὶ πιστεύετε ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ.
“The time (kairos) is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15)
εἰδότες τὸν καιρόν, ὅτι ὥρα ἤδη ὑμᾶς ἐξ ὕπνου ἐγερθῆναι…
“You know the kairos, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep…” Romans (13:11)
In therapy, Kairos represents those moments where transformation becomes possible: a pause that suddenly deepens, a gesture that carries weight, a silence that reveals more than words.
Philosophically, Kairos does not interrupt Chronos, which flows on, but names the rightness of a moment — the timing when a possibility becomes visible. Heidegger’s phenomenology of temporality shows that existence is not simply stretched along a neutral timeline but is always already disclosed in possibilities. Chronos provides the horizon of continuity, while Kairos names the rightness of timing within it—when a possibility becomes salient and existence can show itself otherwise. Harold Kelman, in Kairos: The Auspicious Moment, underscores Kairos as the incalculable instant when truth enters[4]. Ó Murchadha, in The Time of Revolution, describes Kairos as the revolutionary moment that destabilizes the ordinary flow, opening the possibility of beginning anew.[5]
Heidegger captures this dimension in his notion of the Augenblick — the Moment of Vision. As he writes in Being and Time:
“The Moment of Vision permits us to see our authentic possibilities as they stand in a resolute opening of the future.”[6]
Heidegger’s Augenblick is not a fleeting instant in clock time, but the gathering of temporality into a readiness-for — a timing in which past, present, and future converge in decisive openness.
The term Augenblick carries an important history. Martin Luther (whose translation of Scripture reshaped both language and faith), had translated Paul’s kairos as “im Augenblick” — the “twinkling of an eye” or “eye-flash” — which suggests a fleeting instant within Chronos. Heidegger deliberately rethinks this: the Augenblick is not a temporal instant but a resolute openness, the timing in which existence gathers itself into possibility.
It resonates closely with the idea of Kairos: the opportune moment when existence discloses itself anew, not through fabrication, but through a readiness to see and to act.
Thus, Chronos and Kairos are not adversaries but companions. Chronos sustains the therapeutic process, while Kairos grants it depth and transformative power. Therapy that remains only in Chronos risks becoming mechanical, mere repetition of scheduled hours. Therapy that opens to Kairos, however, allows those hours to become charged with meaning, carrying within them the possibility of renewal.
Temporal Freedom in Therapy
Therapy, though structured by Chronos, is not reducible to it. The therapist’s task is not only to manage time but to safeguard the possibility of Kairos. Such moments cannot be forced; they arrive – yet they require the therapist’s openness, a letting-be that recognizes and receives them.
This stance resonates with Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, the freedom-for-letting-things be, in which one neither forces nor abandons, but clears a space for what can disclose itself. Kairos corresponds to what Heidegger calls the Augenblick, the Moment of Vision, when temporality gathers itself into a decisive openness. Therapy, at its depth, is the art of preparing for this Augenblick while dwelling in Chronos — not as a point within measured time, but as the timing in which temporality gathers into openness.
The stance of the therapist resembles that of the gardener described by Chantal Delsol: not the demiurge who seeks to fabricate a new world, but the humble cultivator who tends, protects, and accompanies what is already there. In the same way, the therapist is not a sovereign master of time but a guardian and co-creator with the analysand, preparing the ground in which the unforeseen flowering of Kairos may occur.
Likewise, Binswanger emphasized that the therapist is not an engineer of the psyche but a companion in the analysand’s Weltentwurf—the world-design that structures how one inhabits space and time. In depression, he observed that the future horizon collapses; in mania, time rushes uncontrollably forward. To dwell therapeutically with the analysand is to remain alongside these distortions without coercion, preparing the ground for a new opening of existence. Binswanger spoke of world-designs (Weltentwürfe) but later admitted he had misunderstood Heidegger.
Medard Boss, in contrast, developed Daseinsanalysis more faithfully, emphasizing Freiraum — the free space for existence to unfold. Illness, for Boss, is often a constriction of this space, a narrowing of the temporal-spatial openness of being-in-the-world. The therapist does not impose meaning but safeguards the possibility of disclosure by letting the analysand’s world show itself as it is. In this sense, Boss’s existential-analytic therapist is very close to the gardener: patient, humble, clearing away what chokes growth, but never pulling on the plant in the hope of hastening it.
This gardener-like posture offers a powerful metaphor for the therapeutic relation. The therapist engages in practices of patience and attentiveness that can appear modest but are in fact profound. The gardener rises each morning not to invent nature, but to meet it anew, to work alongside its mystery and unpredictability. Likewise, the therapist does not enter the session in order to invent the other’s world, but to accompany it, to participate in its growth and unfolding, however uncertain or uneven that may be. In both cases, there is humility: an acknowledgment that what matters most exceeds one’s control, and that the task is not to dominate but to tend, protect, and foster.
The gardener knows that results are never guaranteed. Despite following the rules of the art, fruit can still be tasteless or plants withered. Yet beauty may also emerge unexpectedly, without design, in ways that astonish even the one who labors. This is the very logic of Kairos: the emergence of the unanticipated, the emergence of meaning that cannot be engineered but only received. The therapist, too, finds that moments of transformation may come where least expected: a silence that deepens rather than deadens, a gesture that suddenly carries weight, a fragile word that discloses a horizon of possibility. These are the blossoms of Kairos, which arise not from the will of the therapist but from the shared openness of the encounter.
The demiurge believes in fabrication, in abolishing what is in order to erect something new. As Delsol puts it:
“The twentieth century was devastated by the demiurgy of totalitarianisms, which sought to respond through attempts at a transfiguration of the human world. But it would be wrong to believe that these illusions have abandoned us. What we forcefully rejected was totalitarianism as terror. Yet we continue to pursue attempts at transfiguring the world, at abolishing this imperfect world.” [7]
Therapy conducted under such a spirit becomes coercive, manipulative, or prematurely interpretive. The gardener, in contrast, honors what already exists, however fragile or distorted, and seeks to nurture its latent possibilities.
Václav Havel warned of this temptation:
“I had wanted to make history move ahead in the same way that a child pulls on a plant to make it grow more quickly. I believe we must learn to wait as we learn to create. We have to patiently sow the seeds, assiduously water the earth where they are sown and give the plants the time that is their own. One cannot fool a plant any more than one can fool history”. (quoted in Meadows 2008).[8]
His warning mirrors the therapeutic stance: to rush is to destroy; to wait is to allow Kairos.
This image of therapy as cultivation underscores that temporal freedom does not mean escaping Chronos but inhabiting it differently. Just as the gardener works within the rhythms of the seasons—bounded, predictable, sometimes harsh—so the therapist works within the measured time of sessions, calendars, and endings. Freedom is found not in abolishing limits, but in letting those limits open into possibility.
In a different but resonant register, Jacques Lacan formalized a technical cut in the session’s chronology (coupure). Lacan proposed that the analytic session need not obey the mechanical duration of Chronos, the fixed “fifty-minute hour,” but should sometimes be brought to a close at a decisive instant, even abruptly. The cut thus suspends the chronological flow of speech in order to mark the emergence of a signifier that would otherwise be lost in continuity[9].
What is crucial here is not the manipulation of time for its own sake, but the recognition that genuine transformation often depends on an interruption of the ordinary order. The cut reveals that meaning does not lie in the endless extension of discourse but in the moment when speech is punctuated and something irreducible shines through. From a Daseinanalytic perspective, one could say that the cut lets the rightness of timing (Kairos) come to the fore within the session’s ongoing flow, so that a possibility for existence can be seen.
The gardener metaphor captures the same spirit. The gardener cannot force the seed to grow by pulling on its stem—such a demiurgic gesture destroys life. What he can do is till the soil, water patiently, and be attentive to the moment when growth occurs of itself. Likewise, the therapist, in holding the session lightly, allows for the possibility that a cut, a silence, or a shift in attunement may become the space in which Kairos happens. To exercise this restraint is not to abandon responsibility but to recognize that authentic transformation cannot be manufactured, only safeguarded. In this sense, Lacan’s cut, Delsol’s gardener, and Heidegger’s Augenblick all converge: each point to the way in which temporal freedom is disclosed not by abolishing limits, but by letting the right moment appear within them.
While Lacan emphasized the kairotic force of shortening the session, introducing a cut that punctuates speech, Christopher Bollas took the opposite path in certain crises: he extended the session, sometimes radically, in order to hold the other person through the abyss of breakdown.
Christopher Bollas has observed that moments of breakdown call for a radical rethinking of the temporal frame of therapy. While most analytic work is conducted within the fixed hour, Bollas recognized that such rigidity could abandon the analysand precisely when they most need analytic presence. He describes cases in which he increased frequency to twice-daily, seven days a week, sustaining this rhythm for weeks, and even instances of all-day sessions from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. for several consecutive days. The aim was not to overwhelm the analysand with interpretation but to hold them through the temporal abyss of breakdown, ensuring that the collapse could become a passage rather than an annihilation.
As he puts it in his chapter on time:
“More than anything, the patient who is breaking down needs time. The breakdown must be allowed time to happen, within a human relationship in which the other is there to hear from the self and not run away from it… it must be clear to them that the psychoanalyst is prepared to stick it out for as long as it takes.”[10]
Here, the extension of time itself becomes therapeutic, an act of resisting Chronos as pure measure and opening a space where Kairos might appear. By refusing to cut short the analysand’s temporal crisis, the analyst safeguards the possibility that what threatens to be a breakdown may instead be reconfigured as a breakthrough.
Miles Groth has also underlined the importance of flexibility in the temporal structure of therapy. Instead of rigidly adhering to the fixed analytic hour, he suggests that it can be beneficial to retain the freedom to see one person at 9:00, another at 12:00, and a third at 15:00, while leaving open when exactly each session will end within that frame.[11] The value of this flexibility is that it prevents the clock from dictating the rhythm of the encounter. The session may close earlier or extend longer depending on when the work reaches its natural point of punctuation. In this way, therapeutic time becomes less about external measure and more about responsiveness to the unfolding of the dialogue, allowing the rightness of timing (Kairos) to emerge within Chronos in ways attuned to each unique meeting.
Opening Kairos
How does one prepare for Kairos within the inevitable flow of Chronos?
The first requirement is the analyst’s specific mode of attunement. We are always already attuned, yet in therapy this means cultivating a particular openness: not simply a passing mood, but a readiness to hear and to receive. The therapist must listen in a way that goes beyond technique, an openness that is not pre-scripted or forced. This is the posture of Delsol’s gardener, who tends the soil and waits with humility, attentive to what may emerge. It is not the demiurgic stance of forcing or fabricating, but of safeguarding the fragile shoots of meaning when they first appear. Such attunement means hearing the silence that deepens rather than deadens, noticing the small gesture that suddenly carries disproportionate weight, remaining present to what cannot be engineered but only received.
The second requirement is patience. Rather than rushing to fill time or to resolve despair, the therapist must bear the weight of time without grasping for shortcuts. Christopher Bollas reminds us that in moments of breakdown, what the person most needs is precisely time itself—the willingness of the analyst to “stick it out for as long as it takes.”[12] Patience here may mean extending the hour radically, holding open whole days of encounter, or simply sitting with the unbearable present until it begins to open into possibility. Like the gardener waiting through seasons, the therapist knows that fruit ripens when it ripens, not when forced.
Alongside this cultivated, therapeutic attunement and patience stands the virtue of flexibility. Miles Groth has emphasized that therapeutic time must remain supple: sometimes the work comes to a natural close in minutes, sometimes it unfolds across the span of hours.[13] The precise measure is less important than the willingness to adapt to the rhythm of the encounter. Such flexibility resists the tyranny of the fixed hour and honors the fact that the decisive moment may come early or late, and that the session must remain open to it. In this way, therapeutic time becomes less about external measure and more about responsiveness to the unfolding of dialogue, allowing Kairos to break into Chronos in ways uniquely attuned to each meeting.
Flexibility concerns the external frame of the session, while freedom-for — another requirement — names the inner stance of letting-be that guides such choices. Heidegger’s Gelassenheit describes the stance of letting-be – standing ready for the moment without attempting to will or manufacture it. This corresponds to Heidegger’s Augenblick, understood not as a temporal instant but as a resolute openness, a readiness-for. In practice, such freedom may involve the kairotic cut described by Lacan: the sudden ending of a session at the precise point when a signifier emerges with force, creating a moment in Chronos through which meaning shines. At other times, freedom-for may mean the opposite: extending the session, as Bollas proposes, in order to hold the other through the abyss of breakdown. In both cases, the therapist shows that authentic transformation cannot be manufactured but only safeguarded.
Finally, the preparation for Kairos requires wonder. This is the attitude Delsol attributes to the gardener: the capacity to marvel at what arises beyond one’s control. To wonder at the simplest flower is to recognize that therapy, too, is always more than the sum of its techniques. When the person who came for help glimpses possibility where once there was only despair, when silence suddenly glows with meaning, both the analyst and the analysand share in the astonishment of Kairos breaking through Chronos. Wonder transforms therapy from technical practice into an existential art, one grounded in awe at the mystery of being itself.
Clinical Illustration
I am always uncertain how much one should alter when presenting a clinical vignette. Freud is often credited with the idea that vignettes should remain largely intact, to preserve their meaning; Anna Freud, by contrast, is said to have advocated greater change to protect privacy and context. Jung, for his part, refused to regard his own life as an object of scientific scrutiny, writing in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
“I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.”[14]
Miles Groth goes even further – he argues that case studies are of no value since they are fictions, based on the clinician’s inferences about the experience of the analysand based on what the latter reports as best she can.
My stance is that a person coming for help should never become a ‘case study’; this would be an attack on their integrity and dignity. Nevertheless, certain human situations arising within the therapeutic relation, when presented with adequacy and ethical consideration, may serve as meaningful illustration. Under this disclaimer, I will reveal a part of my daseinanalytic praxis.
A woman — let us call her Daisy — in her fifties, entered analysis, weighed down by fear of life (Lebensangst) and by deep struggles in caring for her daughter. She described how everything appears threatening, how this heaviness has accompanied her for as long as she could remember. Again and again, she spoke of her helplessness in knowing how to care for her child. Often, she returned to her father — a sailor, distant, cold, unapproachable — who, one day, had simply ceased speaking to her. She never knew what it meant to be held by him.
One morning, as we sat together, something unexpected occurred. My young daughter, nearly five years old, after a difficult night, suddenly ran into the office crying. She climbed onto my lap and clung to me, sobbing. I held her quietly. After a few minutes she settled, her breath softened, and she returned upstairs to rest. Daisy had sat silently throughout, watching and sharing the moment. At last, she spoke with astonishment: “This is exactly what I have been missing my whole life.”
This moment could not have been planned, nor engineered. It was an Ereignis — an opening within Chronos through which something essential was revealed. No interpretation was required. The experience itself was unforced, uncalculated. It was a kairotic phenomenon, an appearance of what had always been missing for Daisy. It disclosed a new possibility of being-with that could now be lived in deeper ways of caring, especially for her own daughter.
This was not a therapeutic intervention as the application of technique, but a therapeutic experience as an unexpected event in time. The kairotic timing could not have been predicted. It manifested itself silently as a letting-be in which the possibility of being-held — and of holding — came into presence.
Conclusion
In every therapeutic hour, there is the possibility that time may disclose itself differently not as succession, but as the timing in which something becomes possible — that within the measured Chronos, the unmeasurable Kairos may shine forth. To open Kairos inside Chronos is to grant temporal freedom, where the analysand may experience existence not as a sequence of burdens but as an opening toward possibility.
One conclusion we may draw is that therapy, at least in part, is a practice of timing. Not merely a profession bound to calendars, schedules, and the necessary order of Chronos, but an art of cultivating the moment where Chronos gives way to something other. Therapy is about protecting the fragile space where meaning can arise, about safeguarding the possibility of Kairos. Here the therapist resembles Delsol’s gardener: a figure who tends patiently, humbly, without pretension to fabricate a new world, yet who knows that unexpected beauty can appear in due season. The therapist, like the gardener, does not command transformation, but prepares the soil for it.
Heidegger’s philosophy teaches us that temporality is not an external container but the very horizon of existence itself. The Augenblick, or Moment of Vision, gathers past, present, and future into a decisive openness of timing — not a point in chronometric time, but a readiness in which existence shows itself anew.
In the therapeutic encounter, this corresponds to the kairotic instant when an analysand’s existence is disclosed anew: when despair reveals a hidden possibility, when silence becomes luminous, when what seemed foreclosed opens to freedom. This is not an escape from Chronos, but its transfiguration. Chronos provides the frame, but Kairos provides the depth — the moment of grace within the ordinary passage of time.
Lacan’s cut sharpens this insight: transformation often depends not on continuity but on rupture. The analytic session, like the lived hour of therapy, is not measured only by its duration but by the way it can be punctuated — cut in such a way that something previously unseen comes to light. The kairotic cut punctuates the session’s chronology so that meaning can stand out. In this way Lacan, Delsol, and Heidegger converge: each show that freedom in time is not the product of control but of letting the right moment emerge.
For praxis, this means that therapy cannot be reduced to protocol, technique, or calculation. Its deepest aim is to help the analysand rediscover a freer relation to time itself: no longer condemned to an oppressive Chronos, but able to encounter those moments where life appears as possibility. Therapy at its best gives back to the person the dignity of belonging to a world that surpasses them, and the wonder of recognizing themselves as co-creators in its unfolding.
Thus, to let Kairos arise within Chronos is not only a therapeutic task but an existential stance. It is to live as gardener rather than demiurge, to wait rather than to fabricate, to safeguard rather than to dominate. It is to affirm that even within the measured hours of suffering, there can arise a moment of vision, a blossoming of meaning. In this sense, therapy is both profoundly modest and immeasurably ambitious: modest in its refusal to promise fabrication, ambitious in its faith that within the ordinary span of time, the extraordinary may occur. It is this faith — that the unmeasurable may disclose itself within the measured— that sustains the therapeutic art and gives it its deepest significance.
References
Bergson, Henri: L’évolution créatrice, Paris: Félix Alcan 1907.
Binswanger, Ludwig: Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins, Zürich: Niehans 1942.
Bollas, Christopher: Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, London: Routledge 2013.
Boss, Medard: Grundriß der Medizin und Psychologie, Bern: Hans Huber 1971.
Delsol, Chantal: La haine du monde: Totalitarismes et postmodernité, Paris: Éditions du Cerf 2016.
Groth, Miles: Seminar, American Daseinsanalytic Institute, 2025.
Heidegger, Martin: Sein und Zeit. Gesamtausgabe (Band 2), Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1977.
Heidegger, Martin: Gelassenheit. Gesamtausgabe (Band 13), Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1989.
Jung, C. G.: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, revised ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Kelman, Harold: Kairos: The Auspicious Moment, in: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 29/1 (1969), 59–83
Lacan, Jacques: Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge 2001.
Meadows, Donella H.: Thinking in Systems: A Primer, White River Junction: Chelsea Green 2008.
Minkowski, Eugène: Le temps vécu. Études phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques, Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé 1933.
Ó Murchadha, Felix: The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger, London: Bloomsbury 2013.
Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle–Aland, 28th revised edition, Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft 2012.
Abbreviations
SZ – Sein und Zeit
Figure 1 – Chronos – winged old man with scythe/hourglass – author’s illustration, after classical iconography, based on descriptions in Greek antiquity (cf. Lysippos, 4th c. BCE) and later receptions.
Figure 2 – Kairos – winged youth with forelock and scales – author’s illustration, after classical iconography, based on descriptions in Greek antiquity (cf. Lysippos, 4th c. BCE) and later receptions.
[1] Chantal Delsol: La haine du monde: Totalitarismes et postmodernité, Paris: Éditions du Cerf 2016, 7. Translation mine.
[2] Heidegger: SZ (1927), 328
[3] Heidegger: SZ (1927), 17.
[4] Harold Kelman: “Kairos: The Auspicious Moment,” in: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 29/1 (1969), 59–83
[5] Ó Murchadha, Felix: The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger, London: Bloomsbury 2013, 30
[6] Heidegger: SZ (1927), 338
[7] Chantal Delsol: La haine du monde: Totalitarismes et postmodernité, Paris: Éditions du Cerf 2016, 7. Translation mine.
[8] Meadows, Donella H.: Thinking in Systems: A Primer, White River Junction: Chelsea Green 2008, (quoting Václav Havel)
[9] Lacan, Jacques: Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge 2001, 257–258
[10] Bollas, Christopher: Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, London: Routledge 2013, 75.
[11] Groth, Miles: seminar, American Daseinsanalytic Institute, 2025, personal notes.
[12] Bollas: Catch Them Before They Fall, 75.
[13] Groth: Seminar, 2025.
[14] Jung, C. G.: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, revised ed., New York: Vintage Books 1989, 3.
