Episode 11: ... and the time's rhythm now lies motionless, piling into an ever lasting present: A phenomenology of Trauma

What happens when time itself breaks? When trauma strikes, it is not merely an event but a rupture in self-temporalization—a fracture in the very way we experience time. In this episode, we turn to phenomenology and Bergsonian philosophy to explore how trauma shatters the flow of lived time, leaving the past piled into an everlasting present.

Drawing on Husserl’s internal time-consciousness, we examine how trauma fixates the past on a moment that refuses to recede, freezing the subject in an unassimilable past. Meanwhile, Bergson’s notion of pure memory and habitual memory helps us understand why traumatic experience resists integration: instead of passing into the virtual reservoir of memory, it remains actualized, replayed, and embodied as raw sensations.

Through this lens, we ask: How does trauma distort the horizon of possibilities, severing one’s ability to anticipate the future? What does it mean to live trapped within the broken hourglass of time, where experience no longer flows but solidifies into an eternal now? And can phenomenology offer a way to restore movement to time, allowing the self to re-engage with the world beyond the moment of rupture?