The relations between embodiment and temporality reach from the micro-temporality of conscious experience to the enactment of human existence. First, the basic internal time consciousness is marked by the rhythmicity of vital processes (heart beat, respiratory rhythm, daily periods, etc.). Moreover, the bodily drives, urges, and needs, which may be subsumed under the term conation, crucially determine the future-directed temporality of primary experience. On the other hand, the body forms an extract of sensorimotor and affective experience which are sedimented in implicit or body memory, thus shaping an individual's capacities and dispositions. Finally, existential temporality is essentially characterized by the vital processes of birth, growth, aging, and dying.

Body, time, and intersubjectivity are equally interconnected. First, interbodily resonance establishes the primary experience of the shared present, beginning in the child's early development. Thus, a basic contemporality emerges, which later continues in social synchronizations and temporal orders as the basis of social life. However, this temporal alignment is also subject to desynchronizations, for example, in backlogs of tasks, in guilt, remorse, or grief – situations that require processes of psychosocial resynchronization.

All these interconnections are subject to various kinds of disturbances which are also found in psychopathology and thus crucially determine the emergence and course of mental disorders.

Catatonia is a severe psychiatric syndrome, characterized by specific motor abnormalities such as immobility, mutism, staring, rigidity, or psychomotor agitation. Until recently, it was often thought of as a subtype of schizophrenia. Today it is recognized to occur with different medical and psychiatric illnesses, and possibly independently thereof. Catatonia has a remarkable high incidence in the clinical setting, and its clinical presentation is often impressive and thought-provoking. Despite decades of scientific inquiry, catatonia remains poorly understood. Surprisingly, phenomenological psychopathology has only devoted little attention to the phenomenon. In order to increase our understanding of catatonia, this article investigates its phenomenology, i.e., its subjective and intersubjective presentation. We present a clinical vignette and clarify its phenomenology with emphasis on fear, embodiment, and temporality. Indirectly, this investigation will shed a different light on how trauma can affect subjectivity, in both its embodied and temporal dimension.