IN AN ESSAY written in 1949, the psychoanalyst, DW Winnicott argued that
the reason why the experience of birth is traumatic is that the baby is in the
total grip of external forces which, because she has no sense of time – and
thus no sense of an ending – she cannot know is not permanent. It was an experience,
he remarked, that was not unlike that of recent camp prisoners in the
war, crushed, deprived of all agency, and without a sense that the experience
would ever end. 1
To be born into time, as Augustine taught, is to be human. To be deliberately
and instrumentally, or casually and carelessly, deprived of time, it might follow,
is to be subject to an inhuman act: banished not only from the world, but thrown
back into timelessness – of trauma without end.