Time, thou must untangle this

In his little book on Jung (see What I've Been Reading), Anthony Stevens quotes Jung on the function of time in the therapy process:

The psychoanalyst thinks he must see his patient for an hour a day for months on end; I manage in difficult cases with three or four sittings a week. As a rule I content myself with two, and once the patient has got going, he is reduced to one. . . . In addition, I break off the threatment every ten weeks or so. . . . In such a procedure time can take effect as a healing factor (132-33).

Jung's optimism about the healing power of time reminds me of the contrast between the ways Shakespeare's tragic and comic heroes view time. For Hamlet, "the time is out of joint" (Hamlet 1, 5, 206), and for Macbeth, time's arrow points only toward meaninglessness:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death (Macbeth 5, 5, 20-24).

In the comedy Twelfth Night, Viola—one of Shakespeare's delightful cross-dressing trickster heroines—takes a very different view of time:

What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master's love.
As I am woman (now alas the day!),
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?
O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me t' untie (2, 2, 34-38).