Birthdays are curious markers of time. On the surface, they are simple: another year has passed, another candle is added to the cake. Yet beneath the social rituals of celebration, reflection, and sometimes even avoidance, birthdays stir something deeper. They serve as psychological milestones, triggering unconscious processes that shape how we relate to time, memory, and selfhood.
In a previous reflection, I explored the passage of time through the lenses of philosophy and physics, touching upon the paradoxical nature of time as both a measurable variable and a deeply subjective experience. This time, I want to take a different approach, one influenced by the British psychoanalytic tradition, particularly its insights into the unconscious experience of time and ageing.
Birthdays as Temporal Markers in the Psyche
The British psychoanalytic school, from Freud’s foundational theories to the work of figures like Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion, has long been concerned with the way time operates in the unconscious. Freud himself viewed time as largely irrelevant to unconscious processes, famously describing the unconscious as timeless. Memories, traumas, and desires do not “age” in the way conscious thoughts do—they persist, often untouched by the passage of years, returning with the same emotional intensity when triggered.
Yet, despite this supposed timelessness, birthdays act as annual reminders of time’s forward march. For some, they are occasions of joy, reinforcing a sense of growth and achievement. For others, they evoke nostalgia, regret, or even anxiety. This duality speaks to the tension between the progressive time of the external world and the repetitive, cyclical time of the unconscious.
The Birthday as a Site of Unconscious Conflict
From a Kleinian perspective, birthdays might activate deep-seated conflicts between past and present, between idealisation and loss. Melanie Klein’s theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions offers a useful framework here. In early infancy, we oscillate between splitting the world into “good” and “bad” and integrating these opposites into a more cohesive whole. Birthdays can sometimes evoke a similar oscillation:
• The birthday as a moment of idealisation: A child’s early birthdays are often filled with excitement, gifts, and celebration. This can create an unconscious expectation that birthdays should always be moments of joy and recognition. Even in adulthood, there may be a lingering hope—sometimes disappointed—that birthdays will bring a sense of renewal or affirmation.
• The birthday as a confrontation with loss: As we age, birthdays can also become reminders of what is no longer possible, of relationships lost, of youthful dreams unfulfilled. This shift can be seen through Klein’s depressive position, where the individual comes to terms with loss, mourning past versions of the self while integrating new realities.
Winnicott’s work on the true and false self also resonates here. Socially, birthdays encourage a kind of performativity—the expectation to be happy, to celebrate, to receive attention. But beneath this outward performance, many people experience a more private, internal dialogue about what the passing of time means to them. The tension between the “birthday self” presented to the world and the “inner self” reflecting in solitude can be acute.
The Passage of Time and the Unconscious
Wilfred Bion’s work on memory and experience offers further insight into the way birthdays function in the psyche. Bion distinguished between “knowing about an experience” and “experiencing an experience.” One might consciously acknowledge that they are getting older, but at certain birthdays—especially those marking decades or significant transitions—there may be a sudden emotional realisation of ageing.
For instance, turning 30, 40, or 50 may trigger unexpected feelings of grief or urgency, not because of the number itself but because the unconscious suddenly “processes” the passage of time in a way that was previously defended against. This can manifest in what psychoanalysis calls “anniversaries of the psyche”—moments when unprocessed losses, fears, or desires resurface, often without an immediately obvious trigger.
Birthdays, the Fear of the Future, and Temporal Anxiety
One of the recurring themes in both therapy and personal reflection is the anxiety associated with an unpredictable future. Birthdays can heighten this sense of uncertainty, serving as psychic thresholds where the past, present, and future collide.
• Projection into the future: Birthdays often invite comparison between where one thought they would be and where they actually are. For some, this comparison is reassuring; for others, it provokes existential anxiety.
• Regressive pulls: At the same time, birthdays may reactivate earlier developmental stages. Freud observed that significant life events often revive childhood patterns—on a birthday, one might long for the safety of early familial relationships or feel an unconscious desire to be “seen” as special, as one was in childhood.
• The wish to control time: A fundamental source of anxiety is time’s unpredictability. The unknown future is both possibility and threat. In a way, birthday rituals—blowing out candles, making wishes, receiving predictable congratulations—offer a temporary illusion of control over time. Yet beneath the surface, they also serve as reminders that time moves forward regardless of our wishes.
From Reflection to Acceptance
In my own life, I have experienced birthdays in radically different ways, shaped by geography, career changes, and shifting life stages. At 17, when I left Greece to study in Lausanne, birthdays carried the thrill of departure and possibility. At 27, during my military service in Greece, they were marked by a sense of pause, an interlude before life resumed. In London, where I moved in 1995, birthdays were often entangled with professional milestones—each year measured in projects completed, goals reached, and career transitions.
Now, living in a remote village at the foothills of the Pyrenees, birthdays feel different. Here, time is measured less by calendars and more by the changing light over the mountains, the rhythm of the seasons. And yet, the internal clock—the one shaped by memory and longing—remains.
Perhaps the challenge of birthdays is not simply to mark the passage of time but to cultivate a different relationship with time itself. Instead of viewing time as something external that happens to us, we might see it as something we participate in—something that grows within us as much as we grow within it.
The British psychoanalytic school teaches us that time in the unconscious is not linear. The past is always present in some form, shaping our experience of today. But if the past persists, so too does the capacity for renewal. Each birthday is not just a marker of time lost but a potential site of integration—a moment where memory, self-perception, and future possibility converge.
So, whether birthdays bring joy, nostalgia, anxiety, or a complex mix of all three, they remain profound psychological events. They are reminders not only of time’s movement but of our own capacity to reflect, to change, and, ultimately, to embrace the mystery of time itself.
By Ari Sotiriou psychotherapist
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