IN AN ESSAY written in 1949, the psychoanalyst, DW Winnicott argued that the reason why the experience of birth is traumatic is that the baby is in the total grip of external forces which, because she has no sense of time – and thus no sense of an ending – she cannot know is not permanent. It was an experience, he remarked, that was not unlike that of recent camp prisoners in the war, crushed, deprived of all agency, and without a sense that the experience would ever end. 1 To be born into time, as Augustine taught, is to be human. To be deliberately and instrumentally, or casually and carelessly, deprived of time, it might follow, is to be subject to an inhuman act: banished not only from the world, but thrown back into timelessness – of trauma without end.