Retranscribing the past: Memory, subjectivity and trauma among Afghan asylum seekers in Greece

On the basis of ethnographic evidence obtained during fieldwork in Greece with Afghan asylum seekers, this paper elaborates on the concept of time in psychodynamic terms, as opposed to the phenomenological, chronologically-based experience of it. My claim is that temporality, as for psychic functioning, is based on non-linear, circular dynamics in which past and present experiences, affects and traumas are in a continuous unconscious dialogue and constantly inform each other, in a way that allows the past to be “retranscribed” in its deep meanings and intimate significance, and the present to acquire enhanced worth and connotations.