The World’s Clock

Reflections on the Perception of Time

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the perception of time as a psychic experience, especially how this phenomenon occurs at a time when its experience and apprehension is more and more ephemeral, producing a generalized sensation of scarcity and progressive acceleration of time. To accomplish this plan, reflections were built about this subject, through a dialog between Jungian psychology and propositions from contemporary authors from different fields of knowledge who deal with the same subject, especially Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology. Although time itself is nothing more than an abstraction or a category of understanding, according to some theorists, what is important for us to consider is its archetypal dimension, as expressed in the myths covered in this text, notably Cronos, given his great emphasis in the contemporary world. Thus, from a perspective that considers almost exclusively its quantitative aspects, it is necessary that we begin to give more meaning to the acts of our daily lives, even the simplest ones, so that our experience with time is full of quality and completeness. In short, our study was limited to simply proposing brief reflections on how contemporary man experiences time and what are the circumstances involved and possibly determining perceptual changes.