[Atemporality, history, and semiophysics]

The atemporality of the unconscious was a temporary term, used by Freud between 1911 and 1920. His definition was the result of consideration of energy, upon which it is intrinsically dependent. This is one of the contradictions that the term bears; other contradictioins depend upon its correlation to the elaboration of the concept of transfer, of its relationship with the existence of the principle of pleasure and with that of the dynamic point of view. But, atemporality is one of the terms with which Freud designated the tension between the reference to classical science and the morphological and morphogenetical point of view to which he, little by little, gave precedence, while he was forming metapsychology. The term disappeared after the introduction of the life and death urges, which would subsume the meanings introduced by atemporality. It is qualitative dynamics and semiophysics, to the extent that they reconsider the limits that classical science had placed on the concept of time, that allow for a new reading of the Freudian elaboration. They provide the possibility of stylizing the notion of time that Freud requires and they show the accuracy of his intuitions, beyond the manifest contradictions. The history of psychoanalysis could find herein some methodological elements.