Abstract
One of the symptoms of trauma is said to be a “sense of foreshortened future.” Without further qualification, it is not clear how to interpret this. In this paper, we offer a phenomenological account of what the experience consists of. To do so, we focus on the effects of torture. We describe how traumatic events, especially those that are deliberately inflicted by other people, can lead to a loss of “trust” or “confidence” in the world. This undermines the intelligibility of one’s projects, cares, and commitments, in a way that amounts to a change in the structure of temporal experience. The paper concludes by briefly addressing the implications of this for how we respond to trauma, as well as offering some remarks on the relationship between trauma and psychosis.
Highlights
The Istanbul Protocol, a United Nations guide for investigating and documenting cases of torture, describes one of its long-term effects as follows: The victim has a subjective feeling of having been irreparably damaged and having undergone an irreversible personality change
This undermines the intelligibility of one’s projects, cares, and commitments, in a way that amounts to a change in the structure of temporal experience.The paper concludes by briefly addressing the implications of this for how we respond to trauma, as well as offering some remarks on the relationship between trauma and psychosis
Some forms of post-traumatic dissociation may be symptomatic of finding oneself in a “different world” while others involve the preservation of one’s world. 22Stolorow (2011, p. 55) describes such an experience as follows: “experiences of emotional trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned.[. . ..] In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching along collapses; past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition.” 23The changes in temporal experience that we have described overlap with how some people with depression diagnoses experience time
Summary
Citation for published item: Ratclie, M. and Ruddell, M. and Smith, B. (2014) 'What is a sense of foreshortened future? A phenomenological study of trauma, trust, and time.', Frontiers in psychology., 5 . p. 1026. Citation for published item: Ratclie, M. and Ruddell, M. and Smith, B. What is a “sense of foreshortened future?” A phenomenological study of trauma, trust, and time. We describe how traumatic events, especially those that are deliberately inflicted by other people, can lead to a loss of “trust” or “confidence” in the world This undermines the intelligibility of one’s projects, cares, and commitments, in a way that amounts to a change in the structure of temporal experience.The paper concludes by briefly addressing the implications of this for how we respond to trauma, as well as offering some remarks on the relationship between trauma and psychosis
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