” Moreover, iconographic representations portray

Kronos-Saturn devouring his own children (except Zeus), concretely conveying the idea that time indeed makes events precipitate into an abyss and disappear into oblivion.3 Meaningful correlations between melancholic states and the dimension of time and temporal flow has become an important Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical frame of reference for psychological and biological studies of affectivity and mood. Contributions of phenomenology and classical psychopathology Von Gebsattel,4 Strauss,5 Minkowski,6 and Tellenbach7 have highlighted the important role of temporality in phenomenological psychopathology. Drawing on philosophical concepts of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, these authors have analyzed inhibitors deviations Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical or distortions

of time-experience, mainly from an individual subjective perspective. They and others have noted a slowing down or inhibition of time-experience or, in strictly phenomenological terminology, of lived time in depression and an acceleration of perceived time-experience in mania.8,9 Lived time includes a social dimension that allows for harmonizing subjective and interpersonal Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical time-experience as a contribution to a sense of past, present, and future. Subjective lived time and its reference to interpersonal time-experience are bound together in the dimensions of past, present, and future. Indeed, the dynamics of everyday interactions imply habitual synchronization. They bring about a fundamental feeling of being attuned to the time of others, and living with them in the same “inter-subjective temporality.”8 Lived time is primarily Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical a lived synchronicity with the environment and with others. It is only from periodic desynchronizations, commonly associated with loss, guilt, or separation, that the experience of “not-yet” or “no-more” results. According to Puchs,8 it is not that synchronization brings about the awareness of lived time; on the contrary, this occurs

from disturbances Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical caused by biological or psychosocial factors. The processes of subjective time and interpersonal time normally Rolziracetam unfold more or less together and influence each other. This exchange results in a sense of being in “lived synchronization” with others and of being “in tune” with the time of others.6 For example, during “melancholic episodes,” some individuals may become disengaged from interpersonal time and live in their own subjective inner temporality. In some temporally distorted experiences of severe melancholia, there is no future and the past is fixed. During these melancholic episodes while external interpersonal time still flows and measured time still has duration and lapses or intervals, lived time is instead experienced as a slowing down or stopping of subjective inner time-experience because it is experienced or measured against interpersonal time.