This paper emphasizes the “intertemporality of our subjectivities” and argues for the crucial importance in the psychoanalytic relationship of recognition of patients’ and analysts’ temporal experiences in both their conscious and their unconscious aspects. Although psychoanalytic theorizing implicitly addresses the theme of time in terms of developmental theories, it is often not explicitly explored; spatial metaphors of, for example, internal and external are, by contrast, dominant. Questions about time are intrinsic to those regarding memory and forgetting, embodiment, language, the continuity and/or discontinuities of identities, the socio-historical specificity of the subject, the significance of death for us in our lived present, and of change. The crucial relevance of the work of phenomenological/post-phenomenological philosophers Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Levinas to questions of time in psychoanalytic practice is discussed. Sensitivity to the patient’s shifting positions in relation to past, present, and future dimensions of time is vital to the analyst’s recognition of the ways in which the patient is different, not only that they are different. An attentiveness to the relation between time and recognition allows for openness to the contingency of identities, whether in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, physical abilities and the multiplicity of other possible identities.