ABSTRACT
This chapter refers to the dialectical intertwining between Chronos and Kairos. Kairos points to the trauma patient’s tentative efforts to create a “kairotic” space as a defense against Chronos. Trauma patients build their experience upon a “denial of time,” which is intrinsic to resistance to change and transformation. Trauma results in a sense of “extended time,” whereby a shifting back and forth between outer perception and self-awareness occurs. Trauma patients seem to lack a sense of temporal identity. They live in a universe devoid of object relations, and feel “alone in eternity.” Human feelings about time and timelessness may be either constructive or destructive, depending on their relationship to the pleasure principle (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos), respectively. Finding an adaptive dialectic between these two poles is the scope and goal of human existence.
