The idea of the synchronic has given us a conceptual platform for analysing the psychological constitution of time: what it is that makes up our sense of the present. It tells us that what we experience as the present is an intersubjective construction that draws in elements placed as both past and future. The present is where we live, but its reality is psychical not physical. This insight has only been underlined by the discoveries of modern physics. Since the advent of the theory of relativity, time seems to have become ever more diverse and less and less subject to any unified perspective or uniform system of measurement in physics: ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one’ quoth Einstein (in Davies, 1995, p. 70). All of which makes psychology's traditional way of treating change as evolving ‘over time’ increasingly problematic.

This chapter argues that psychologists need to disentangle the concept of psychical alteration from considerations of time and recognise change as the more fundamental concept. We know from experience that the passage of time has no necessary bearing on alteration.