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Trauma and human existence.

Article Excerpt
Stolorow, R.D. (2007). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections. New York: The Analytic Press / Taylor and Francis, 62 pages, ISBNO-88163-467-0 (Paper).

Reviewed by Mufid James Hannush, Review Editor, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, author of Becoming Good Parents: An Existential Journey

Robert D. Stolorow begins by telling us, his readers, that his book contains two interrelated themes. The first theme has to do with the relational context of our emotional lives. The other theme has to do with the observation that the potentiality of emotional trauma is embedded into the foundational fabric of our human existence. The conversion of this potentiality into an enduring actuality of our experiential world is contingent upon our lived relational context. He adds that he will "trace the interweaving of these two themes, in large part as they crystallize in my understanding of my own experience of traumatic loss. Taken as a whole, the book exhibits the unity of the deeply personal, the theoretical, and the philosophical in the understanding I have come to acquire of emotional trauma and the place it occupies in human existence" (p.xi).

The focus on subjective emotional experience has resulted in a movement toward, what Stolorow calls " phenomenological contextualism." Affect is always embedded in a dynamic intersubjective field. For example, throughout all the stages of the life cycle, affect or emotional experience cannot be separated from "the intersubjective contexts of attunement and malattunement in which it was felt" (p.3). Not only affect, but all aspects of psychological life are to be understood contextually, including emotional or psychological conflict, therapeutic interpretation, resistance, transference, trauma, and unconsciousness.

For Stolorow, trauma is "in essence, an experience of unbearable affect" (p. 9). Trauma, as an unendurable affect, is always embedded in an intersubjective field in which extreme emotional pain cannot find a holding "relational home." Whether it is discrete or cumulative, a "lack ... lies at the heart of trauma" (p. 10). What is lacking is a holding home or a validating...

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