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The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.
—SHAKESPEARE: Hamlet, 1.5
FOLLOWING TRAUMATIC EVENTS, INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETIES tell "stories" which carry with them fascinating underlying disturbances of time sense. Beginning with my first study of the kidnapped schoolchildren of Chowchilla (Terr, 1979), I recognized two time disorders—time-skew and omen formation—which appeared in the aftermath of that overwhelming event. I then studied a group of 30 separately and individually traumatized children and adults and found that 26 of them displayed various malfunctions of time perception (Terr, 1983a). I began to wonder what defensive (Bernner, 1981), protective, or other roles (Hartmann et al., 1946), perception, particularly that of "time," could play in psychic trauma, and what distortions of time sense might follow from a traumatic experience. These defensive and protective roles of time perception will serve as the organizing focus of this article.
In this paper I use the terms "time sense," "time perception," and "time conceptualization." By "time sense" I mean the subjective feelings and meanings connected with the perception of time passage. "Time perception" (also, "time functioning") is the conscious, and perhaps unconscious, sensory experience of time. "Time conceptualization" is the attribution of symbolic