| Description: |
This chapter is informed by our combined professional experiences of working alongside survivors of political violence, conducting research within high security prisons, and by voluntary and clinical work around criminal desistance, criminal victimisation, self-harm, and suicide prevention. The meanings we continue to make of these professional encounters intersect with personal experiences of loss, grief, suffering, and uncertainty that have punctuated our own subjectivities. This search for meaning has been both a cause and an effect of our ongoing engagement with existential philosophy, phenomenological sociology, and psychotherapy. Our reflections here on human suffering coalesce around existentialist ideas concerning time and temporality. In essence, the chapter asks: how do people deal with lost time? This question has provided us with remarkably similar insights once we transcend restrictive and reductive categories of selfhood frequently deployed across the social sciences, such as ‘victim’, ‘offender’, ‘patient’, ‘carer’, ‘mourner’, and so on. We explore strategies people frequently employ to reconcile with lost time in ways which both align with, and depart from, existentialist principles, and advocate for more philosophically oriented theories of selfhood than typically proliferate in our respective disciplines. |