Time is not a neutral container within which clinical experience unfolds. It is itself constitutive of suffering, identity, and healing. This essay argues that the therapeutic relationship is, at its deepest level, a temporal intervention — a site in which fractured, collapsed, or petrified time is reconstructed into something livable. I have proposed elsewhere that the clinical encounter functions as a form of sacred space in which the patient is received as a sacred messenger rather than a diagnostic object, and that the physician’s vocation requires what I have called therapeutic tzimtzum: a disciplined self-withdrawal that creates room for the other (Ungar-Sargon, 2025; Ungar-Sargon, 2025). The present essay extends that argument into the dimension of time specifically, drawing on four traditions that have grappled most seriously with temporal experience: Western biblical linearity and sacred interruption, Eastern cyclicality and transcendence, the existential pragmatism of the Twelve-Step movement, and the Kabbalistic theology of rupture and repair as elaborated by Elliot R. Wolfson. The synthesis offered here proposes a theory of therapeutic temporality in which the clinician functions as a temporal witness — one who holds time open for the patient long enough for healing to become possible. Drawing on my sustained engagement with these themes across more than a decade of clinical practice and medical humanities scholarship, I argue that healing, understood at its deepest level, is not primarily a biological event but a temporal one.
Keywords: Therapeutic relationship; temporality; Kabbalah; Twelve-Step recovery; hermeneutic medicine; sacred time; Wolfson; tzimtzum; medical humanities; sacred brokenness.
Citation: Ungar-Sargon, J. (2026). Time, Rupture, and Presence: Reconstructing Temporality in the Therapeutic Relationship. J Psychol Neurosci; 8(3):1-11. DOI : https://doi.org/10.47485/2693-2490.1157