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Robert Pollack
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We learn in the Missing Moment that for no grander reason than the mechanics of our neurological wiring, man lives in the past-about a second behind the times. That second during which perception is processed and becomes consciousness is the missing moment of the title. It is then that unconsciousness, which Freud confirmed is irrepressible and incessant, operates freely to affect and shape a person's world and, of course, a scientist's science. As long as it is conducted by scientists, Pollack tells us, science is therefore not only a subjective pursuit-contrary to its reputation for unassailable objectivity-but cannot be otherwise.
It is also to the unconscious that our fears, death leading the pack, are banished. Try as we might to repress them, the fears nevertheless remain untamed-except, Pollack says, by "biomedical scientists, who have built their models of our bodies and minds on the presumption that we exist only in the context of outside time, [for they] have found-through their work-a way to avoid confronting their own mortality." These scientists may numb their fear of death by working in a world where the clock never runs down, but as a consequence they have also grown numb to human needs.
He concludes by recommending a psychoanalytic antidote: that scientists stop repressing the fear of death and learn to embrace it. The salutary effect of this, were its application possible, would spread to us all, scientists and non-scientists alike. "In the same way that uncovering repressed thoughts and fears can relieve a person of the burdens of the past and permit a freedom and range of self-expression in the present, so medical science is likely to become more interesting and more valuable to all of us once scientists acknowledge how the passage of different internal times affects their own bodies [and] their own minds . . . ."
Written by an insider and arriving at a time when the biomedical field is increasingly under fire for losing touch with the needs of the public it supposedly serves, The Missing Moment is a timely, insightful and constructive contribution to the debates that are shaping the future of science.
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