The triptych of the mirror,the portal,and the resurrection: Re-thinking the psychology of time through Stenner and Zittoun’s academic chronotopic artistry

Abstract

Stenner and Zittoun’s application of the chronotope to the psychology of time is considered as an academic and artistic breakthrough for theoretical psychology and beyond. This commentary is presented as a discussion of a triptych and an imagined tour through the three pictures it paints. The first (the mirror) considers Žižek’s presence in the psychology of film from within a mirror chronotope—as a useful counterpoint to Stenner and Zittoun’s undertaking. The second (the portal) highlights the art–life bond in created, creating, and creative chronotopes and the potential of this bond to re-shape our understanding of time but also of cognitive processes, learning, and aesthetics. The third, “the resurrection,” discusses the relationship between polyphony and the chronotope as a type of “syncrisis” where re-embodied Beings in alternative chronotopes move between art and life; author and “hero.” The radical potential of this re-imagining of time for psychology more generally is briefly discussed.

Welcome to the TIMPO time-space room in psychology’s gallery

Stenner and Zittoun (2026) are clearly “appreciators” of Christopher Nolan’s TIMPO films. They are “appreciators” in the same sense that Bakhtin is an “appreciator” of Dostoevsky. It is a creative, intertextual appreciation where art is brought into direct dialogue with life.

Bakhtin famously (among Bakhtin scholars) wrote a deeply powerful appreciation of Dostoevsky in 1929 and then went back to it in 1963, to extend it further, in a clear labour of love. After a flawed English translation by Rotsel in 1973 (Bakhtin, 1973), the book came blazing back into the English-speaking world in 1984 with a redemptive, sparkling translation by Caryl Emerson (Bakhtin, 1984). The take-home message from this translation was that Dostoevsky was out on his own for being polyphonic. ¹ Thus began a multi-disciplinary fascination with the metaphor and a dialogical zeitgeist which found its way into theoretical psychology in the 1990s and the new millennium. Electrified by the sheer originality and diversity of his work and translations, authors such as Bertau (e.g., 2007), Bandlamudi (1999), Burkitt (1998), Cresswell (2011), Fernyhough (1996), Gillespie and Cornish (2010), Hermans (2002), Hicks (1996), Larrain and Haye (2012), Madill and Sullivan (2010), Mahendran (2008), Marková (2003), Matusov (2007), Shotter and Billig (1998), Sullivan (2012), White (2009), and Zittoun (2014) set methodology, communication, education, creativity, cognition, health, development, and emotion to a dialogical beat. And now, here, in re-thinking the psychology of time in film, that dialogical beat could go viral.

To be polyphonic, as an aesthetic feat, is to achieve an equality of perspective between the creator and the created, the author and the hero. Some irreverence is needed for this as author(ity) is subverted, and the seeds, Bakhtin (1984) suggests, lie in the ancient Menippean genre and in Socratic irony. Across space and time, different voices/perspectives are brought together into a relationship of dialogue; interrogation of one another (anacrisis) and personal trials and tribulations (syncrisis). An analogy is a dream where the characters are brought together in incongruous, surprising ways, even for the author of the dream.

The research article genre makes equality of perspective between author and hero challenging. The author is in the driving seat of where the article goes. This is one of the problems of psychological research in general where citations and quotations (including those of participants) are tightly regulated by authorial choices to align with the logos of their investigation (Sullivan & Ackroyd, 2023). All which makes for an ironic contrast between the monological tendency of the article and the dialogical values it espouses; an irony Bakhtin and dialogical scholars (such as Buber) would have appreciated but did not comment upon, as per the convention at that time and now.

While the distilled logos of a research article may make the kind of aesthetic polyphony Dostoevsky achieved impossible, there is still a possibility within the academic genre for a more expansive criss-crossing of time, space, and voice. Logos can still be refracted through the dialogue it suggests. An irreverent mésalliance of thoughts, ideas, and voices can collide in the academic space. Academics, too, can be chronotopic artists.

Stenner and Zittoun demonstrate chronotopic artistry in inviting TIMPO and Christopher Nolan as the “hero” (erstwhile “author”) into their arena of academic exploration. It is unusual for psychology and theoretical psychology to adventure into this terrain. Their logos or purpose is to re-work the chronotope (the space-time tenet of dialogue), which ends up re-working aesthetics into overlapping worlds of created, creating, and creative chronotopes. Poetically, they suggest that in Christopher Nolan’s films, “art and life weave into one another thanks to being woven out of one another.” While for Bakhtin, Dostoevsky achieved greatness exactly by inventing the form of polyphonic authorship, characterized in the main by a lack of authorial control, it is clear that for Stenner and Zittoun, Nolan achieves if not greatness, then something special by being a “chronotopic artist.” He uses the medium of film to “showtime.”

Nolan artistically plays with “showtime” to the appreciative pleasure of Stenner and Zittoun. Using his film-work, they show that time and space are moving in multiple directions out of cultural space in and out of authorial imagination and the world. Bakhtin’s corrective to Kant’s a priori of time and space suggests time and space are relative to the author-hero architectonic and not to cognitive structures of apperception alone. And this author-hero architectonic is both wildly imaginative and irreverent and utterly prosaic in gravitating to cultural norms. Bakhtin’s literary exemplars show this but Stenner and Zittoun use Christopher’s Nolan’s films to add further new dimensions—such as the technology of time travel and disorientation and the paradoxical nature of permanent liminality.

Such complexity of time-space is missed in everyday psychology, partly because of psychological fallacies. The psychological fallacies that Stenner and Zittoun draw attention to bedevil psychology and the social sciences precisely because these disciplines tend to separate art from life. If, in life, we exist in cultural created chronotopes, as heroes of cultural authors and of one another—where artistic genres actually structure our perception of the world—then everything becomes relative to the genre of understandings that guide action. An excellent example is Bandlamudi’s (1999) re-description of Piaget’s stages according to chronotope and genre. Genre is where our unit of analysis should lie; but not in art alone (as in literary studies) but in that weaving in and out of art and life. This is what would make psychology more quantum and less binary.

Moving out of that “creating world” of empirical fallacies and into the “created world” of academic genres, Stenner and Zittoun appear as interlopers in film and cultural studies. Staggering to the end of their article after an immense exposition and re-creation of chronotope, there is a brief acknowledgment of this inception into the world of others and they summon energy to give a swift pre-emptive blow to structural alternatives to their processual approach (process ontology) before the final hit of the conclusion. These structural approaches (including psychoanalytic approaches) tend to work on the plane of the “form of the content” of film without attention to its constitution as an aesthetic object as a liminal affective technology, rendering them “simple” and “static.”

Nonetheless, Stenner and Zittoun are up against it in making leeway with a new genre, which is what this target article is venturing and adventuring through. The first task of this commentary then will be to make a bit of extra time and space to create a dialogue with a Big Other in the landscape of film, culture, and identity to spark an “anacrisis.” The psychology of film is a terrain dominated by Slavoj Žižek, who works as a big Other for our purposes. Žižek is a cultural giant of the psychology of film landscape, and his genre is that of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian deconstruction. For aesthetic reasons, I paint this anacrisis as the first of three in a triptych of anacrisis and syncrisis. This triptych aims to disorientate and reconfigure the traveler across chronotopes. The parts of the triptych are: the mirror, the portal, and the resurrection.

Triptych I: The mirror chronotope: Catching the distorted reflection of Žižek in Stenner and Zittoun’s work

Mirror: Word origin and history

c.1225, from Old French mireor “a reflecting glass,” earlier miradoir (11c.), from mirer “look at,” from Vulgar Latin *mirare, from Latin mirari “to wonder at, admire” (see miracle). Fig. usage is attested from c.1300. (Good Word Guide, 2025)

The psychoanalytic tradition does not use the term “chronotope,” but a key metaphor for Lacanian psychoanalysts is that of the mirror and the mirror stage. The mirror is characterized by “misrecognition.” If someone looks in the mirror, they see a reflection which is an inverted version of their true image and a peculiarly “mirror” pose that is not generally available in real life or at least in life outside the mirror. It is structured by a paradoxical logic—the subject is reflected back as a presentation of self but is also not-self; distorted by the anticipation of other’s views of the image. It is significant others (the symbolic structure; the big Other) who seduce the subject into misrecognizing the complete and full mirror image as the one true subject, even if this leaves a sense of lack in the subject; a feeling that there is more potential than is captured by the reflection.

Žižek’s Hitchcock is Stenner and Zittoun’s Christopher Nolan. He gives a fabulous exposition of Vertigo in his book Organs without Bodies (Žižek, 2012). There are just a couple of examples that highlight the relevance of the surreal mirror chronotope to Stenner and Zittoun, as follows.

On the mirror motif and the kino eye

In Vertigo, the main character, Scottie, is smitten by Madeleine, who is murdered in a staged suicide (without Scottie’s knowledge) by her husband and his accomplice Judy. Judy impersonates a suicidal Madeleine for Scottie to witness. Traumatized by an apparent suicide jump, Scottie goes into psychiatric care. On his release, he coincidentally meets Judy and seeks to turn her (back) into Madeleine.

The kino eye depicts not what Scottie (the main protagonist) sees but what he imagines:

Although Scottie does not see Madeline’s profile, he acts as if he is mysteriously captivated by it, deeply affected by it . . . or to put it in Lacan’s terms, this shot of the profile of Madeleine appears on the Other Scene, inaccessible to the subject precisely insofar as it is located in its very core. (Zizek, 2012: 154)

We see Judy’s profile which is completely dark (in contrast to Madeleine’s dazzling profile at Ernie’s) . . . it is as if to fully exist her dark half waits to be filled in by Madeline’s dazzling profile. And at this point, Judy is reduced to a formless pre-ontological stain, she is subjectivised – this anguished half face, totally unsure of itself, designates the birth of the subject. (Zizek, 2012: 160; emphasis in original)

In the language of the chronotope, the mirror space is what Lacan refers to as an extimate (rather than an intimate space)—outside self, recognized as self but distorted by the desire of others. Temporally speaking, the mirror reflects back a compressed/condensed, frozen image interpolated in a symbolic order; an historical archive of misrecognition.

Within Hitchcock’s “created” aesthetic world, Scottie is an appreciator-obsessive of Madeline (if that is not too transgressive a re-imagining of “appreciator”). He watches her from afar. This analysis provides a darker counterpoint to some of the humanistic optimism of Bakhtin’s work. The technology of the “kino” eye draws attention to what lies behind the (male?) gaze: a distorted “pre-ontological stain” of an Other behind the other. The “kino eye” transcends the author per se and speaks to the kind of eternal, universal truths of the mirror. In this regard, there is a Kantian flavor to the mirror motif. It reveals but also distorts what was already there—in an a priori time-space matrix.

On sex and language in the mirror

Theoretical psychologists tend not to theorize sex. Žižek has no such scruples and writes with relish about Hitchcock from the perspective of sex and language in the mirror. In Vertigo, while dancing, Scottie is disgusted at Judy’s body, which resembles, but is not, the ethereal presence of Madeleine. Žižek (2012: 161) comments:

perhaps the ultimate proof of love for the other is that I am ready to share with the other the very heart of my masturbatory idiotic jouissance . . . Scottie does not really want to make love to Judy-Madeleine; he literally wants to masturbate with the aid of her real body. And this phallic dimension also enables us to define in a precise way, sexual possession. Its ultimate formula is not the exploitation of the partner as a sexual object, but the renunciation of such use, the attitude of “I do not want anything from you, no sexual favours . . . on condition that you also do not have any sex with others.”

The unconscious is not actually below consciousness but rather in an intimate-extimate relationship with it. From Lacan’s “jubilant assumption of his specular image” in the early stages of misrecognition, there is always a mismatch between the fantasized imago and the jubilant subject, leaving an unknown excess (in the Real). Hence, sex in the mirror chronotope is both a phallic aid for the ecstatic projection of prejudice and the imposition of a structured order on the other. Elements of this of course happen, e.g., when a racist or misogynist uses the opportunity of conversation for the release of spasms of rage. “Sexual possession” as “proof of love” appears in the mirror chronotope as capturing the other’s alienating presence in a web of personal symptoms.

Yet, love and sex, considered as an ideal aesthetic experience, weave life out of art and art out of life as one is a portal to the other. It is art-life (like space-time) where, as Stenner and Zittoun point out, the author-artist sculpts new shapes of Being through the material of a relatively stable architectonic. The opposite formula to renunciation then holds in dialogue, such as: “I want to learn all I can from you (to be open eros to a third space between us) without any conditions.” No proof is needed.

On transcendence within the mirror opposite

But Nolan’s film fails to show how the evocation of any kind of spiritual depth obfuscated the horror of a new reality created by science. To effectively confront the “naked apocalypse” or cataclysm without redemption, the opposite of spiritual depth is needed: an utterly irreverent comic spirit. One should recall that the best movies about the Holocaust – Pasqualino Settebellezze (1974), Life is Beautiful (1997) – are comedies, not because they trivialise the Holocaust but because they implicitly admit that it is too crazy a crime to be narrated as a “tragic” story.

Žižek (2023)

Žižek is more critical of Oppenheimer here than Stenner and Zittoun are. The mirror opposite of tragedy—that is, comedy—is instead considered by Žižek as more appropriate. Through the distortion, we can more properly intimate, on the plane of extimacy, the horrors of the “new reality.” To translate to chronotope—a constraint on the “chronotopic artist” is that looking for transcendent, spiritual depth from the creating of an atrocious world in a created chronotope of film is hopeless. This begs the question, however, of whether, in reverse, looking for tragic spiritual depth in the lightness of Being is also hopeless.

Transcendence as spiritual enlightenment is not possible in complete tragedy but a surreal experience into the absurd is. Lacan was influenced by surrealism, working directly with Dali and others to paint the unconscious. The fragility of a structured order is exposed by this surrealist project. As in dreams, objects melt away; there are further paradoxes of silent screams (Munch), and libidinal excesses of the ‘Real’ that structure the fragile order. The self is haunted by the big Other (the watchful but blind and innocent censor) and its petit object a or illusory search for the object of desire (that which it is alienated from but which constitutes subjectivity—a knot), and the greatest moment of self-actualization realizes the presence of others (the discourse of the other that mediates). What is liberated, if anything, through surrealism is jouissance as much as moral destiny, but that jouissance exists through a complex relationship with the symbolic structure. It functions through alienation.

Anacrisis means the provocation of one dia-logic through another. The scene is therefore set for a tour through to the next picture of the triptych—that of the portal chronotope and its liminal logic. These paradoxical and liminal logics are separate but they interconnect and test one another in the search for dialogic truth.

Tiptych II: The portal: Liminal logic in Christopher Nolan’s films

Portal: Word origin and history

c.1380, from Middle Latin portale “city gate, porch,” from neut. of portalis (adj.) “of a gate,” from Latin porta “gate.” (Good Word Guide, 2025).

The “portal chronotope” refers to the point of access in a boundary line between worlds. A book or a film as a cultural produce is a portal into another world. Language is a portal between private and public worlds. Stenner and Zittoun demonstrate that real-world chronotopes (creating chronotopes) can be transposed to artistic chronotopes (created chronotopes such as a film) and appreciated/crafted in a creative chronotope. For example, Stephen King (2000) tells us in his memoir that an old desolate piece of ground in his childhood became re-imagined in countless books and films. A portal is a chronotope of its own between different worlds.

Stenner and Zittoun nicely outline the meaning of liminality, its roots in ritual, and the genius of Nolan in creating permanent liminality. There is also a paradox in “permanent liminality.” Stenner and Zittoun point out that “permanent liminality” is both oxymoronic (permanent transition) and paradoxical (irreversible and reversible time). Yet, the paradox is a condition of flourishing within liminal logic, rather than a symptom of any particular subject, in the mirror chronotope. There is one line in particular that is particularly nicely put here and that acts as a springboard into some reflections on what liminal logic within the portal genre offers psychology and the psychology of film:

Nolan’s films enable their appreciators to creatively generate and enjoy experiences in which temporality emerges, not as a single dimension, but as a complex composition: a symphony of mutually resonant or discordant times (Serres, 2019, p.53). They create experiential conditions for grasping and enjoying this symphony of times as it informs our lives. (Stenner & Zittoun, 2026: p. 143)

A complex composition and a symphony of multiple spatio-temporal arenas complement the musical metaphor of polyphony. Different voices may traverse these spaces in the search for truth (see Triptych III below). In Lacanian structures, we have the psychotic, the neurotic, and the pervert, who materialize different configurations to the triadic Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. In a liminal space and time, in contrast, the primary ontological position and ontological commitment is that of “learning.” Stenner and Zittoun’s work draws attention to the transformative potential of film to elevate human experience. That is why the term “appreciator” is so key.

As a learning space, the portal lies between the public world and the private world. It includes “a more knowledgeable other”—Neils Bohr for Oppenheimer, the architect guide in Inception—and Stenner and Zittoun guide the audience too into the intricacies of showing space-time. Watching the films and reading the article (or doing so in reverse) is a learning pleasure. In the portal, the pliability of structure affords the opportunity to learn from one another; to enhance skills, to teach, to flourish, and to play. We see the result of this in what Dewey (1934) calls “an aesthetic experience” versus regular everyday experience. In such playful aesthetics, there appears to be more of an injection of what the Greeks called eros or open invitation as a pleasure of learning from the other. Eros is the bridge thrown to the other by the word, as Voloshinov and Bakhtin point out (Voloshinov, 1986).

Language is the time-space technological device democratically available to all and mastered by rhetoricians and artists who use the techniques of genre, in the creating, creative, created chronotope. These genres can be devised in the real world such as when a cafe (e.g. Betty’s in Yorkshire); or a village, e.g. (Frigiliana in Spain) devises a time-space in the past as an imitative copy that brings people in. Equally, as Zittoun’s (e.g., 2025) work illustrates, everyday time-spaces, such as the teleology embedded in stage models (future time and state causing the present), can be thrown into creative disarray in ruptures from the trajectory. There are different types of play and pleasures of thinking that attend in the moment-to-moment of development (Zittoun, 2025).

The portal is used to enhance psychological processes. Enhancing memory of the present (déjà vu) is foregrounded as much as the more traditional memory of the past (i.e., Memento, Tenet). Dreams are tools of epistemological investigation for truth. Perception and attention processes separate out and cross the three worlds of created, creating, and creative chronotopes, but re-converge in an “appreciator” creatively understanding art. Daydreaming too is as an art that crosses time and space. In a time when the cultivation of mindfulness is so prevalent, daydreaming is quite a different set of skills—more like basking in the sensory texture of memory, image, and personal connotation in multiple worlds than draining the self away from the world or transcending the world.

In the next and final part of the triptych, we will move from the provocations of anacrisis to those of syncrisis. Syncrisis is more concerned with the tribulations of the hero as they traverse through the depth and variety of “truth” as it is lived.

Triptych III: The metaphysical dia-logic of resurrection across creating, created, and creative chronotopes

Resurrection: Word origin and history

c.1300, from Anglo French resurrectiun, Old French resurrection, from Late Latin resurrectionem, from pp. stem of Latin resurgere “rise again” (see resurgent). (Good Word Guide, 2025)

Bakhtin (1993) plays on the important distinction in Russian between pravda (truth as lived or incarnated) and istina (truth as abstract and theoretical). For example, theoretically we know that we all die but when someone we love dies, that knowledge acquires emotional connotations, complexity, and depth. Dostoevsky was the ultimate master of this, Bakhtin (1984: 31–32) claims: “Even ‘truth in itself’ he presents in the spirit of Christian ideology, as incarnated in Christ; that is, he presents it as a personality entering into a relationship with other personalities.” Word meaning, insofar as it transcends the physical, is both metaphysical and embodied in life, physical. In Dostoevsky’s polyphony, big ideas (e.g., the question of whether utilitarianism is possible) are embodied in the lives of characters who fiercely debate and provoke one another, and the author, into further dialogic truth.

As meaning (semantics) is both metaphysical and physical, it can be resurrected outside of its typical space and time into a new space and time. Leiman (2002) refers to this aspect of language as the “epiphanic sign.” A classic example of this is a quotation of someone else’s voice. The quote may or may not be intoned with the other’s accent; for example in mimicry, to turn the voice of another into a ridiculous version of itself. Or the quote may be so reverential that it operates a compelling power on the author and the audience.

South Park (2010) resurrected the form-content of Inception with their parody, “Insheeption.” Sharon (an everyday person and mother of Stan, trapped inside the dream of his school counsellor) has dream logic explained to her, to the background of a boombox uttered by an “expert,” and asks a number of questions cross-examining how dream worlds work:

Sharon: Are you all saying that you can go into a dream and take people in that dream into their own dreams?

Expert 1: Not all the time, just this time, and maybe one other time.

Expert 2: It’s so complex and cool.

Sharon: Just because an idea is overly convoluted and complex doesn’t make it cool. Going to multiple dream levels sounds like a really stupid idea.

Expert 1: You just don’t get it because you’re not smart enough. Let’s move! (South Park, 2010)

This re-imagining of the dialogue of Inception resurrects the film into an absurd version of itself, but in doing so it reveals comically how there is another side to the film in the reception of some “appreciators.” In that regard, the words are twisted around and the author loses some authorial intention and control as they find themselves in a syncrisis—a different space-time to the original.

The embodiment of voice into another’s speech is a key foundation of Bakhtin’s philology. The voices of others may break through into a quotation, may become stylized, may remain hidden undercurrents of speech—hidden dialogue (Shotter and Billig, 1998)—or may, in authoritarian discourse, operate a reverse takeover of the author’s voice such that the authoritarian discourse is the one that predominates the voice of the speaker (Bakhtin, 1981). Meaning is populated with the past and present voices of others; in a metaphysical-physical bond.

Resurrection results in changes in the part-whole relationship of identity. Voice, as part of identity, becomes a synecdoche, in a quotation, for the whole person. That synecdoche can still be a powerful agentive force in the voice of another. When viewed as a Lacanian mirror, the whole (the image) is illusory of the collection of parts. Equally, the parts (e.g., Judy dressed as Madeleine) become a fetishist representation of the whole (as in the everyday expression of a preference for a “type” of date, e.g. height / skin color).

Across the Christopher Nolan films themselves, the characters are resurrected into different time-spaces through the devices outlined by Stenner and Zittoun (e.g., dream machine in Inception, body technology of memory in Memento, backward time in Tenet, doubles and electric transportation in Prestige, cross-examination of different versions of Oppenheimer across space-time in Oppenheimer), signaled by filmic devices such as the use of color and black and white, and of hairpin temporalities. This is a disorienting adventure-time where the characters are both suspended in an original trance state (Inception) and fully agentive in a dream state (where a part of consciousness in the trance state acts as full embodied consciousness in the dream state), where they can smuggle ideas into an other’s part-consciousness or reconstruct meaning from their past.

Stenner and Zittoun (2026) remark that

The three chronotopic worlds are not hermetically sealed off from each other but constitute porous points of passage at the threshold between the worlds of art and life. (p.143)

The points of passage, when viewed as a resurrection, entail not only space-time changes but also associated part-whole changes, form-content changes, and istina-pravda changes. Ontology, epistemology, and axiology are the trinity that provide the rationale for this resurrection (as the self is re-embodied ontologically, is cross-examined, and examines knowledge epistemologically and re-orients its architectonic axiologically).

With resurrection from life to art (creating to created chronotope) in a creative chronotope, there are further intriguing questions about duplicity; both in the sense of deception and in the sense of doubling. The aesthetic capture and resurrection from life into art creates the possibility of an authentic, agentic version of the hero in the created chronotope of the art world as well as in the creating world of life itself. The performing self as opposed to the background (pre-ontological stain) self is where some aesthetics places agency and authenticity. Dictators, for example, like to place their image in propaganda art and exert power from this—as an exalted version of self and society (and duplicity is hence revealed through inevitable hypocrisy). In democratic, pluralistic art, different versions of the self authentically exist in parallel across different chronotopes. If shaping the form of one’s life is done according to an aesthetic, we lose control over this self in the “created world” of others and the kind of agency it exerts. Others have freedom to work with our duplicates and their secondary agency, our own aesthetic products, and refract these through their own artistic prism. In the sense of loss of authorial control over one’s aesthetic product, the movement from author to hero is an everyday polyphony characteristic of the porous lines between created, creative, and creating chronotopes. This too can happen in psychology research. Madill and Sullivan (2018) outline the mirrors and portraits held up to participants viewing write-ups of their words. While the loss of agency can be infuriating as well as liberating for authors, finding themselves heroes in the created world, the democratic, open attitude of the appreciator is governed by principles of the open society—of welcome and response to such depictions in the creating world.

Exit to the gift shop

In the art gallery of contemporary psychology, Stenner and Zittoun’s work stands out as a work of academic, chronotopic art. They have reached over to film and resurrected Chrisopher Nolan into a new world of the psychology of space-time. In doing so, they have opened new portals between theoretical psychology and film. The distortions and revelations of the mirror, so beautifully excavated for over 30 years by Žižek, are found lacking. It lacks a learning, creating subject, moving into and out of multiple worlds of art and life. But it is still part of a triptych of anacrisis and syncrisis, of revelations, of counterpoint and alternative looks.

In parallel, in this commentary, Stenner and Zittoun have moved from appreciators of Nolan’s oeuvre to heroes in an appreciator’s created world. That is because as psychological research has become embroiled in a replication crisis, and mired in stale debates and incremental work, this triptych hangs in a room that is pretty much empty. It will soon be populated by other creatives and appreciators and toolmakers.

There are many gifts and mementos to choose from on departure. My own personal favorite is the intriguing relationship between chronotope and polyphony. However, the role of basic cognitive processes is also open to further re-view via this triptych. For example, how memory functions as a resurrection; with meaning crossing from one chronotope to another that can both be controlled (e.g., by ritualistic incantation, reminders, prompts) and come unbidden as a haunting from the past, in a flashback, or encoded in a created world. Or how attention can be cultivated to notice the flows of time and space in and out of art and life in everyday daydreaming. And language as a technology transports between public and private worlds but is both a particle and a wave in that transportation—both embodied and disembodied in voice and meaning respectively.