This paper’s aim is to point out some analogies between time and fiction in film and setting and process in psychoanalysis. Time and the passage of time are only attributed to the conscious while the main characteristics of the system Unconscious are timelessness and the fact that the repressed is unalterable by time. On the other hand, the shifts in time necessary for the analytic work and alleviated by the characteristics of the unconscious are only possible under the protective frame of a stable “objective” setting. Film and psychoanalysis both work only as long as the complex interdependence of time and fiction is preserved and the pairings of setting with process and of reality with phantasy can be differentiated. A lack of differentiation of setting and process in psychoanalysis can provoke unconscious dynamics to take over the whole process and cause a confusion of reality with phantasy and in the end bring about a psychotic breakdown of the patient and the treatment. In the psychoanalytic situation, as well as in film-making and for the spectator, the suspension of time is a precondition for getting closer to unconscious wishes and anxieties. But only the implementation of time, by means of the setting, a cut or a framework - with its separating function, brings about the possibility to use creative potential of the Unconscious and to communicate it in a symbolic way.