Abstract
This article explores the idea that there is a spectrum of individuals who feel compelled to dwell in the past, either due to psychological or social conditions. I analyze both conditions respectively by critically examining two cases: post-traumatic stress disorder and racialized oppression. I propose that individuals with PTSD can feel psychologically compelled to dwell in the past in a dually negative sense: the individual lives in the past but also broods on it, causing them to feel “stuck” in the past. This kind of “dwelling” can cause individuals to suffer disruptions to their sense of self and intersubjectivity. After exploring the psychological case of dwelling in the past, I explore the social sense in which individuals can dwell in the past due to oppressive social structures by examining the case of racialized oppression. The case of racialization is philosophically stimulating because of its intersubjective dimensions—it subverts the idea that dwelling in the past is simply a psychological phenomenon by capturing that others can help or hinder us with maintaining a sense of self and future-directed intentionality. By putting the phenomenological work of Al-Saji into conversation with recent phenomenological research on incarceration, I propose that racialization can be similarly disruptive to one’s sense of self and intersubjectivity. The proposed account is suggestive that traumatic and oppressive experiences may amplify and compound each other in ways not yet well elucidated in the literature. If this account is taken to be persuasive, it is indicative that both psychological and social conditions mediate one’s temporality and well-being.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
No data was analyzed or generated for this manuscript.
Notes
While individuals often experience both modes of implicit and explicit temporality, individuals can experience different durations of temporal flow for the same activity. Consider the example of becoming immersed in an activity. Given my preferences, running is immersive, and I do not pay attention to the time. For another, running may be hopelessly dull; therefore, time is experienced as going more slowly than usual.
Retention typically involves remembering the past and protention anticipating different kinds of futural possibilities.
All modes of temporality are mediated by one’s affective framings. Affective framings are defined as “a subject’s specific cares, concerns, and habits of attention” which can be “understood as the set of self-organized attractors that embody the constraints constructed by the interplay between the system’s own neurobiological dynamics and its environment” (Maiese, 2018).
The metaphor that individuals are “stuck in time” has come under criticism by Craver et al. (2014) for not being fitting to describe individuals with amnesia. Craver et al. argue that individuals with amnesia can value and have a sense of their past, present, and future. Unlike conditions such as depression, where an argument can be made that the individual is de-situated from temporality altogether (Fernandez, 2014; Maiese, 2018), I propose that the same cannot be said concerning individuals with PTSD. The individual with PTSD is situated in a singular temporal frame: that of the past. The metaphor seems to fit the psychological and social case I put forward here.
Having a “sense of a foreshortened future” was a distinct criterion for PTSD outlined in the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whereas the 5th edition expresses “negative expectations of the future” instead (Ratcliffe et al., 2014).
Ngo identifies that dwelling involves a dual sense whereby an individual lives in the past but also broods on it (Ngo, 2019). This description captures the phenomenology in either case, so I adopt it for this article.
This may be because the current phenomenological accounts are weighted in intersubjective instances of trauma and my own account of PTSD is not of this kind.
This may not be the case in instances of repetitive, interpersonal trauma, particularly in cases where an individual is not forced to cohabitate with a perpetuator of violence. In these kinds of cases, the function of the past to the present may function in a similar manner to the case of racialization. The account given by Ratcliffe et al. and losses of interpersonal trust faced by individuals with lived experience of intersubjective trauma suggest this is likely.
Trauma often involves a person experiencing a range of behaviors that correspond to hyperactivity and hypo-activity. Those who suffer from PTSD symptomology will often express not wanting to eat, not wanting to socialize, not wanting to engage in activities that used to bring them joy, whilst, at the same time, remaining on constant guard against stimuli that resembles the original trauma stimuli.
I have focused in this article on what happens if one is preoccupied mentally with the past to the extent that one feels stuck in it in the sense that one lives in a temporal frame and also broods in it. But my account suggests that being stuck in either the present, the future, or one’s imagination will also result in impairments to being able to reconstruct the past and project oneself forwards in time and will likely result in mental distress which will manifest differently in each case. It would be interesting for philosophers of memory and philosophers of psychiatry to explore this consideration further.
It is important to note here that we all have an ability to restrict our memory repertoire when it suits us, particularly in instances of desiring objects we know are not good for us or others. The problem for the person who feels stuck in the past in the way I have fleshed out is that they cannot revert to their fuller memory repertoire. My suggestion is that their limited memory repertoire causes their own desires to be blunted, because they lack this ability to switch back to a fuller repertoire when they please.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
This disruption of semantic memory should be distinguished from disruption to attention because it concerns what one knows about the world around one.
I thank Dr. Brison for her insightful comments on this dual nature of imaginal possibilities during conversation about this manuscript.
This is why Fanon repeats that history is a “prison” for racialized subjects, as it lacks the ability to be reconstructed by individuals for themselves (Fanon contrasts this with memory, which he believes does have reconstructive power) (Fanon et al., 2019).
These processes appear to be extensions of the kinds of processes described by Saidiya Hartman (Hartman, 2022), who describes how the routine violence of slavery is perpetuated under the guise of pleasure, personhood, property. See also work by Michelle Alexander (Alexander, 2010) for an analysis of the anti-Black racism at the heart of incarceration in the U.S.
Relational narrative accounts have emphasized that in order to be able to produce a narrative at all it must gain recognition and uptake in one’s social spheres (Brison, 2017).
Al-Saji’s work on pathological forgetting suggests that this is no accident of the temporal regime (Brison, 2017), but a consequence of the racialization that underpins it.
A cruel example of how repetitive waiting may underpin suicidal ideation in prisoners is the case of George Jackson. Jackson was caught stealing $70 from a gas station in an act of desperation when he was 18, which resulted in Jackson being convicted of an indeterminate sentence—one year to life. He spent the next 11 years in prison, 8 and a half of which were in solitary confinement. Six years into his sentence, Jackson wrote to his mother that she should expect him home soon, as he reported complying with the guard’s demands for an early release. That release never came. Jackson was shot to death trying to escape his indefinite sentence (Jackson, 1994).
See also work by Guenther (2013) on the physical and psychological distress resulting from solitary confinement.
At least not without even more violent or restrictive consequences.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this difference to my attention.
Interestingly, in the case of intersubjective trauma, Herman argues that justice for survivors of sexual abuse warrants the same change—freedom from tyranny and abuse (Herman, 2023).
References
Aho, K. A. (2013). Depression and Embodiment: Phenomenological reflections on motility, Affectivity, and transcendence. Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, 16(4), 751–759.
Al-Saji, A. (2013). Racialized time and the Closure of the past. Insights, 65(5), 1–13.
Al-Saji, A. (2018). SPEP Co-director’s address: Hesitation as philosophical method—travel bans, colonial durations, and the Affective Weight of the past. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 32(3), 331–359. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.32.3.0331.
Al-Saji, A. (2019). Glued to the image: A critical phenomenology of racialization through works of art. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 77(4), 475–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12680.
Al-Saji, A. (2021). Too late: Fanon, the dismembered past, and a phenomenology of Racialized Time. Fanon, Phenomenology and psychology (pp. 177–193). Routledge.
Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
Antze, P., & Lambek, M. (1996). Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory.
Aupperle, R. L., Melrose, A. J., Stein, M. B., & Paulus, M. P. (2012). Executive function and PTSD: Disengaging from trauma. Neuropharmacology, 62(2), 686–694.
Behnke, E. A. (1997). Ghost gestures: Phenomenological investigations of Bodily Micromovements and their intercorporeal implications. Human Studies, 20(2), 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005372501258.
Breslau, N., Davis, G. C., Andreski, P., & Peterson, E. (1991). Traumatic events and posttraumatic stress disorder in an urban population of young adults. Archives of General Psychiatry, 48(3), 216–222. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1991.01810270028003
Brison, S. J. (2002). Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. https://www.degruyter.com/doi/book/10.23943/9781400841493.
Brison, S. J. (2017). Personal identity and relational selves. The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy (1st ed.). Routledge.
Carceral, K. C., & Flaherty, M. G. (2021). The cage of days: Time and temporal experience in prison. Columbia University.
Carroll, L. (2015). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Millenium.
Craver, C. F., Kwan, D., Steindam, C., & Rosenbaum, R. S. (2014). Individuals with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time. Neuropsychologia, 57, 191–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.03.004.
Fanon, F. (1961). Wretched of the Earth. Grove.
Fanon, F. (1973). Black skin, White masks. Grove.
Fanon, F., Khalfa, J., Young, R., & Bloomsbury Publishing. (2019). Alienation and freedom. Bloomsbury Academic.
Fernandez, A. V. (2014). Depression as existential feeling or de-situatedness? Distinguishing structure from mode in psychopathology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), 595–612. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9374-y.
Fivush, R., & Graci, M. (2017). Memory and Social Identity. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of memory (1st ed.). Routledge.
Fuchs, T. (2013). Temporality and psychopathology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12(1), 75–104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9189-4.
Geronimus, A. (2023). Weathering: The extraordinary stress of ordinary life in an unjust society. Little, Brown Spark.
Gerrans, P. (2014). The measure of madness: Philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience, and delusional thought. MIT Press.
Gerrans, P., & Kennett, J. (2010). Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency. Mind, 119(475).
Gilmoor, A., Vallath, S., Regeer, B., & Bunders, J. (2020). If somebody could just understand what I am going through, it would make all the difference: Conceptualizatons of trauma in homeless populations experiencing severe mental illness. Transcultural Psychiatry, 57(3), 455–467.
Govier, T. (1993). Self Trust, Autonomy, and Self Esteem. Hypatia, 8(1), 99–120.
Guenther, L. (2013). Solitary confinement: Social Death and its afterlives. University of Minnesota.
Hartman, S. V. (2022). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. W.W. Norton & Company. Revised and updated paperback edition.
Herman, J. L. (2023). Truth and repair: How trauma survivors envision justice (First edition). Basic Books.
Hunt-Hendrix, L., & Taylor, A. (2024). Solidarity: The past, Present, and future of a world-changing idea. Pantheon Books.
Husserl, E. (1964). The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness. Indiana University Press.
Husserl, E. (1928/1991). On the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time. Springer.
Irish, M. (2016). Semantic Memory as Essential for Future-Orientated Mental Time Travel. In Seeing the Future.
Jackson, G. (1994). Soledad brother: The prison letters of George Jackson. Distributed by Independent Publishers Group.
Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma (4. print). Free Press.
Kirmayer, L. (1996). Landscapes of memory: Trauma, Narrative, and dissociation. Tense past: Cultural essays in Trauma and Memory (pp. 173–199). Routledge.
Lanius, R. A., Terpou, B. A., & McKinnon, M. C. (2020). The sense of self in the aftermath of trauma: Lessons from the default mode network in posttraumatic stress disorder. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1807703. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2020.1807703.
Lopes, M. V. (2023). Too sad to be true: Hypo- and hyperreality in experiences of depression. Philosophical Psychology, 36(7), 1326–1345. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2252448.
Mackenzie, C., & Poltera, J. (2010). Narrative integration, fragmented selves, and autonomy. Hypatia, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01083.x.
Maiese, M. (2018). Getting stuck: Temporal desituatedness in depression. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17(4), 701–718. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9538-7.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery.
Miller, C. (2020). Know My Name; A Memoir. Penguin.
Muller, C. (2021). Exclusion and exploitation: The incarceration of Black americans from slavery to the present. Science, 374(6565), 282–286. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj7781.
Ngo, H. (2019). ‘Get over it’? Racialised Temporalities and Bodily orientations in Time. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(2), 239–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1577231.
Owen, G. S., Freyenhagen, F., Hotopf, M., & Martin, W. (2015). Temporal inabilities and decision-making capacity in depression. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14(1), 163–182. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9327-x.
Ratcliffe, M. (2012). Varieties of temporal experience in Depression. Medicine & Philosophy, 37(2), 114–138.
Ratcliffe, M., Ruddell, M., & Smith, B. (2014). What is a “sense of foreshortened future?” A phenomenological study of trauma, trust, and time. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01026.
Saks, E. R. (2007). The center cannot hold: My journey through madness. Hyperion.
Stanghellini, G., Mancini, M., Fernandez, A. V., Moskalewicz, M., Pompili, M., & Ballerini, M. (2022). Transdiagnostic assessment of temporal experience (TATE) a tool for assessing abnormal time experiences. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 21(1), 73–95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09795-2.
Tewes, C., & Stanghellini, G. (Eds.). (2020). Time and body: Phenomenological and psychopathological approaches. Cambridge University Press.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books.
Volpert-Esmond, H. (2020). Racial discrimination and mental health: Temporal dynamics and neurocognitive moderators. [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Missouri Columbia], University of Missouri Columbia Theses and Dissertation Repository. https://doi.org/10.32469/10355/86513
Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of Trauma effects: Putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author has no conflict of interest to disclose.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Walsh, E.K. The phenomenology of dwelling in the past post-traumatic stress disorder & oppression. Phenom Cogn Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-09990-x
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-09990-x