Traumatic Time and the Genesis of Fearfulness

Trauma devastatingly disrupts the ordinary linearity and unity of our experience of time, our sense of stretching along from the past to an open future. Experiences of emotional trauma be-

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come freeze-framed into an eternal present in which we remain forever trapped or, as Nietzsche captured in his thought of “eternal return,” to which we are condemned to be perpetually returned by life’s slings and arrows. In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching along collapses, the past becomes present, and the future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. Fear experienced in this region entails a dread of retraumatization.

The relentless circling back to experiences of emotional trauma is ensured by the finitude of our existence and the finitude of all those whom we love. Trauma looms, for all of us, as an ever-present possibility and source of fear. I encountered a dramatic example of traumatic temporality and the genesis of fear more than three decades ago. A man in his 40s began his first consultation with me by explaining that he needed psychotherapy to decide whether or not to divorce his wife. Suddenly, a repressed memory of a trauma that he had experienced at five years old sprang dramatically into his consciousness. His mother was terminally ill at the time, and he remembered seeing the unbearable sorrow on her face as she anticipated her death and never being able to see her beloved son again. Soon after recovering this traumatic memory, he told me that he had decided not to divorce his wife because he could not bear the possibility of seeing that same look of sorrow on her face. I never saw him again.

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