Phenomenological psychiatry: Eugène Minkowski’s Lived Time (1933) is the sharpest source. He distinguishes temps stagnant — stagnant time, where the person is cut off from the forward pull of lived duration — from healthy temporal flow. He was working with schizophrenic patients but the structural description maps much wider. The key insight: stagnant time isn’t the absence of experience, it’s experience that can’t metabolize into becoming.

Bergson underneath that: Minkowski was directly building on Bergson’s durée — the idea that authentic time is continuous flowing, not a series of frozen instants. A halt in time is a kind of reification: a moment becomes a thing that sits there, inert, instead of dissolving into the next moment.

Pierre Janet: His concept of idée fixe — a fixed idea that encapsulates a moment and prevents it from being integrated into the ongoing narrative of the self. The object holds the fixed idea in physical form. The interesting thing in Janet is that release isn’t always achieved through confrontation — sometimes the psyche simply outgrows the fixation’s gravitational field.

Winnicott has a less systematic but evocative formulation: “frozen states” where a part of the self went into cold storage at a moment of environmental failure. Thawing happens not through force but through finding conditions safe enough that the frozen part no longer needs to protect itself.