Review of Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections.

Abstract

Robert Stolorow describes his book Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Reflections (2007) as a "project (that) has occupied (him) now for more than 16 years" (p. 45) starting six months after the tragic death to metastatic cancer of his 34-year-old wife Daphne ("Dede") Stolorow, on February 23, 1991. His book exemplifies a value, deeply shared by the author and his late wife, that of "staying rooted in one's own genuine painful emotional experiences" (p. 46). The volume is very dense (50 pages of text, total), the product of 16 years of intense and sensitive reflection. It condenses in very short order the history of his intersubjective perspective on developmental trauma, (the outcome of invalidating malattunement in the "parent-child mutual regulation system" lending to unbearable affect states in search of a "relational home"), his theory of the phenomenology of trauma (the shattering of "absolutisms of everyday life"), trauma's temporality (trauma freeze frames the past and the future into an eternal present), and, finally an analysis of the ontological or universally constitutive aspect of trauma in our lives. This, he argues, following Heidegger (1927) is because we are always in a state of "Being-toward-Death." Much of the last half of his book is based on Heidegger's writings that are then woven into Stolorow's theory of trauma. In this latter manner, Stolorow conflates what has been commonly referred to as Heidegger's concept of "death anxiety" with his own conception of trauma, a controversial point to be addressed later in this review.All of the ideas Stolorow presents in this volume are autobiographically rooted in his examination of the traumatic and the enduring painful loss Dede's death has played in his life. His volume is an exegesis on how he came to terms with this deeply personal loss from which he arrives at a theoretical formulation axiomatic of certain universal propositions about trauma. In positing these universal ontological givens, Stolorow somewhat befuddles his previous intersubjective system theory regarding the uniqueness of human reactions, a position grounded in an epistemological stance of "perspectival realism" (Stolorow, Orange, & Atwood, 2002). This conundrum is amplified by his lack of commentary on what at times seem like contradictions between his earlier epistemological position and the current universalisms emergent in his ontological one in his efforts at delineating an original theory of traumatology.

A Relational Intersubjective Approach to Conjoint Treatment

“…By contrast, Elaine's idea of selling the summer home blindsided him. Indeed, one could say that it virtually traumatized him by her engaging in the "assault of the unimaginable" (Ringstrom, 1999(Ringstrom, , 2010a.…”

“…While being deeply influenced by many writers, these three themes draw their principle organizational roots from the works of a number of differing, although often overlapping, theoreticians that elsewhere I have compared as the intersubjectivists and the relationalists (Ringstrom, 2010a(Ringstrom, , 2010b. Regarding this model's earliest formulation of the first theme-the pursuit of self-actualization in the couple's relationship-the works of the intersubjectivists (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987) was exceedingly important.…”

The geometry of intimacy: Love triangles and couples therapy.

“…Charles (2002) acknowledged monogamous romantic relationships face challenges but concluded, “as problematic as the ideal of symbiotic monogamy may be, we still attempt to accommodate it.” (p. 131). Other contemporary psychoanalytic writings about love, such as by Benjamin (1988, 2004); Aron (1996), Mitchell (1998), Ringstrom (2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2014), and Hoffman (1996), privileged intersubjectivity and mutuality. Like many of their psychoanalytic contemporaries, these theorists consider mature love as involving mutual recognition where intimacy exists between equal partners who recognize one another as subjects, and as such, as separate.…”

Phenomenology is not metaphysics: Reply to Philip Ringstrom.

“…Indeed, the very idea of dividing the world into two groups actually came from one of my traumatized patients, who told me that there was “no possibility… for a normal ever to grasp the experience of a traumatized one” (p. 14). Tellingly, Ringstrom (2010) fails to mention this important fact. Anyone familiar with the phenomenological spirit that has motivated my work over the past 35 years will readily recognize the statement, “When I have been traumatized, my only hope for being deeply understood is to form a connection with [someone] who knows the same darkness” (Stolorow, 2007, p. 49), as a phenomenological description of a common feature in the emotional worlds of traumatized people.…”

“…In one of the concluding paragraphs of his review of my book, Trauma and Human Existence (Stolorow, 2007), Ringstrom (2010) calls for a "community of dialogical truth seeking" (p. 248). Such truth seeking presupposes that a critic of a colleague's work accurately represents that work in the course of criticizing it.…”