ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to illustrate the way in which severe trauma and shame can lead to a loss of the sense of temporality. One of the most interesting things about psychoanalytical theorizing on trauma and shame is the way in which these two concepts gradually became excluded from early psychoanalytical discourse. In health we tend to forget that mind and psyche are born out of the body and we take for granted the lodgement of the psyche in the body. Embodiment, however, is not an automatic achievement and in cases of extreme trauma it can fail to develop or can be lost leading to states of disembodiment. The deliberate and intense process of dehumanization carried out in the camps further intensified these mechanisms, leading to profound changes in the very body image itself. Intense prolonged trauma profoundly transforms the experience of kairos, of subjective time in which past memory, present perception and future desire flow together.
