Portkeys, Eternal Recurrence, and the Phenomenology of Traumatic Temporality

I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it. Sometimes I feel that I may never find my way back to that world, that I may never again be able to feel the peace of being enveloped in the light. … Down here there are no seasons. Not even time exists [Murakami, 1997, p. 392].

A patient of mine (discussed in Stolorow, 2007) with a long, painful history of traumatic violations, shocks, and losses arrived at her session in a profoundly fragmented state. Shortly before, she had seen her psychopharmacologist for a 20-min interview. In an apparent attempt to update her

files, this psychiatrist had required the patient to recount her entire history of traumatization, with no attention given to the emotional impact of this recounting. The patient explained to me that with the retelling of each traumatic episode, a piece of herself broke off and relocated at the time and place of the original trauma. By the time she reached my office, she said she was completely dispersed along the time dimension of her crushing life history. Upon hearing this, I spoke just three words: “Trauma destroys time.” The patient's eyes grew wide; she smiled and said, “I just came together again.”

I use the term portkey, which I borrowed from Harry Potter (Rowling, 2000), to capture the profound impact of emotional trauma on our experience of time. Harry was a severely traumatized little boy, nearly killed by his parents' murderer, and left in the care of a family that cruelly mistreated him. He arose from the ashes of devastating trauma as a wizard in possession of wondrous magical powers, and yet never free from the original trauma, always under threat by his parents' murderer. As a wizard, he encountered portkeys—objects that instantly transported him to other places, obliterating the