by Shlomit Gorin, MA

"We all know that time, this undisciplined element, holds itself within bounds but precariously, thanks to unceasing cultivation, meticulous care, and a continuous regulation and correction of its excesses. Free of this vigilance, it immediately begins to do tricks, run wild, play irresponsible practical jokes, and indulge in crazy clowning" (Schulz 1978).

It is the beginning of a new year. January 1, 2015. The sequential neatness and tangible representation offered by this month and these numbers, side by side, assign an illusionary order to a chaotic and inchoate phenomenon. Against the oftentimes disorienting passage of time, of our passage through time, a new calendar or datebook provides our temporal experience with clean lines and blank pages. Let's not fool ourselves, though. To quote the Polish modernist writer Bruno Schulz once more, "Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which -- like a sixth, smallest toe -- grow a thirteenth freak month" (Schulz 1987). Lucky for us, it's January 1, 2015, just as it's supposed to be. We can breathe a sigh of relief.

At its best, psychoanalysis welcomes the thirteenth month. It notices, invites, and tends to time's tricks and pranks, its wildness and playfulness. It approaches the sixth toe with compassionate curiosity.

At its best, psychoanalysis allows us the freedom to toast, in the absence of melancholy, to a new year that isn't really new. Here's to what we call 2015.  

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Bruno Schulz,Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Walker and Company, 1978), 127.