Giving Up the Hope for a Better Past: Making Meaning of Lost Time

McGowan, W ORCID: 0000-0003-0921-303X and Perrin, C (2026) Giving Up the Hope for a Better Past: Making Meaning of Lost Time. In: Scott, S and Hardie-Bick, J, (eds.) Existential Selves Freedom, Chaos and the Search for Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99-119. ISBN 9783032113375

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Social Science; Centre for the Study of Crime Criminalisation and Social Exclusion (CCSE)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology K Law > K Law (General) H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology > HV8301 Penology. Prisons. Corrections
Divisions:	Law and Justice Studies
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Date of acceptance:	2 July 2025
Date Deposited:	26 Nov 2025 14:59
Last Modified:	02 Mar 2026 10:46
DOI or ID number:	10.1007/978-3-032-11338-2_6
Editors:	Scott, S and Hardie-Bick, J
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27623

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