ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two psychopathologies of temporality: ‘frozen time’ and ‘dead time.’ The breakdown of symbolic capacity, which is found in intense trauma and in intergenerational trauma, leads to incapacity to think of death as a symbolic experience. The phrase ‘the death of time’ was first used by Elie Wiesel to describe the temporal experiences of the inmates of the death camps. In frozen time the inability to accept separation and death leads to a refusal of chronos; that the subject becomes blocked in a purely subjective experience of time which mimics the timelessness of the unconscious. Severe trauma, such as that experienced in the death camps, leads to the ‘death of time’ and can also lead to the loss of the subjective sense of time of kairos: all that remains is the concrete experience of chronological time.
