Are object relations temporal? From the brain’s intrinsic neural timescales over temporo-spatial alignment to object relations

ABSTRACT What are object relations? Otto Kernberg raises this question and addresses it in an excellent way recruiting much of current neuroscientific literature. There is a yet deeper dimension, the brain’s inner time. Inner time means that the brain constructs its own inner timescales: it has various timescales in its neural activity through which it processes external inputs – the external inputs are thus “filtered” through the brain’s various timescales. The brain’s timescales are described as “intrinsic neural timescales” (INT) which can be measured by the degree of the correlation of the signal with itself, i.e. autocorrelation window (ACW). The term window describes it well: the brain has several temporal windows through and by means of which it processes and relates to external inputs which, on the psychodynamic level, surfaces as object relations.