The contemporary psychiatric situation obliges psychiatrists to take into consideration the temporal restrictions of the psychotherapeutic session. When we create the scansion of a session, we hope the quality of the psychotherapy is well conserved, but this is often not an easy task.
 Freud emphasized what he called "deferred action", which regulates the formative process of neurotic symptoms. Deferred action comprises three temporal components: anterograde temporality, in which the patient themselves estimates the causality from the life event to the symptoms they experience; retrograde temporality, in which the life event exerts a backward unconscious influence on the patient's often infantile experiences in the past; and recursive anterograde temporality, in which the patient's infantile experiences generate their current neurotic symptoms. We can make good use of these temporal components to construct the temporal scansion for the duration of each psychotherapeutic session.
 Undertaking a comparative examination of deferred action in symptom formation with the deferred action that proceeds the patient's ongoing therapeutic introspection and investigation of neurotic symptoms reveals that the two mechanisms of deferred actions are the same. Thus, although the formative process of the symptom was the past experience of the patient, it is experienced again in the present life of the patient. The patient can recall the past formative process in the present therapeutic session with the help of the interpretative intervention of the therapist, which can enable the patient to comprehend the significance of the symptom. The scansion of the psychotherapy session can then be constructed. In this way, the temporal scansion of the psychotherapy session facilitates the self―understanding of the patient, and helps them to become more aware of their human dignity.
 Author's abstract