The Static Model

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“An altogether immovable picture emerges, a fixed constellation determined by an all-dominating experience or by irresolvable contradictions and conflicts” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 67).

The static model is one in which time stops—the individual becomes frozen in time, confined to a past event that consumes their present and future, thus ridding of their concept of futurity (Brockmeier, 2000). This model is greatly applicable to neuropsychological disorders. For example, victims of post-trauma stress disorder (PTSD) who are haunted by a past event—fireworks or gunshots, harmless paper bag or homemade bomb, hugging or restraining—will have this trigger that stays with them throughout life. The event is one that their life will constantly revolve around, one that they will forever be paralyzed by. There are also individuals who become static through less traumatic means. Jimmie, a patient with Korsakoff’s syndrome and thus retrograde and anterograde amnesia, has no past or future. However, religion and art were noted to bring some sense of self back into Jimmie, suggesting his comfortability in the timelessness of these two activities. His displacement in time and his refuge in timelessness thus follows the static time model.