The Humanistic Psychologist, 41: 209–218, 2013 Copyright # Division 32 (Humanistic Psychology) of the American Psychological Association ISSN: 0887-3267 print/1547-3333 online DOI: 10.1080/08873267.2012.724266 Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis My Personal, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Sojourn Robert D. Stolorow Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis The dual aim of this article is to show both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches postCartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy. Characterized as a phenomenological contextualism, post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds philosophical grounding in Heidegger’s ontological contextualism, condensed in his term for the human kind of Being, Being-in-the-world. Specifically, Heidegger provides philosophical support (a) for a theoretical and clinical shift from mind to world, from the intrapsychic to the intersubjective; (b) for a shift from the motivational primacy of drives originating in the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind to the motivational primacy of relationally constituted affective experience; and (c) for contextualizing and grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma, which plunges us into a form of Being-toward-death. Post-Cartesian psychoanalysis, in turn, (a) relationalizes Heidegger’s conception of finitude, (b) expands Heidegger’s conception of relationality, and (c) explores some ethical implications of our kinship-in-finitude. PERSONAL I first became interested in the interface of psychoanalysis and existential philosophy as an undergraduate in the early 1960s when I encountered the writings of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, and Rollo May, early pioneers who recognized the relevance of Heidegger’s existential philosophy for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. While a graduate student in clinical psychology, I became disillusioned with empirical psychological research, feeling that it stripped psychology of everything humanly meaningful, and toyed with the idea of doing a second doctorate in philosophy (an ambition that had to await several decades before coming to fruition), which at the time I thought could provide tools for cleaning up the mess that was psychoanalytic theory. However, during my clinical internship I found that I really enjoyed psychoanalytic work and, after completing my doctorate, decided to go to New York to pursue psychoanalytic training instead. A nodal point in my career occurred in 1972 when, still in psychoanalytic training, I took a job as an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers where I met George Atwood, who became my closest collaborator and soul-brother. George (an autodidact with an encyclopedic knowledge of Continental philosophy) and I embarked upon a series of psychobiographical studies Correspondence should be addressed to Robert D. Stolorow, 2444 Wilshire Blvd., #624, Santa Monica, CA 90403. E-mail: robertdstolorow@gmail.com 210 STOLOROW of the personal, subjective origins of the theoretical systems of Freud, Jung, Rank, and Reich, studies that formed the basis of our first book, Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (Stolorow & Atwood, 1979). From these studies, we concluded that, because psychological theories derive to a significant degree from the subjective concerns of their creators, what psychoanalysis and personality psychology needed was a theory of subjectivity itself: a unifying framework capable of accounting not only for the psychological phenomena that other theories address, but also for the theories themselves. In the last chapter of Faces, we outlined a set of proposals for the creation of such a framework, which we called psychoanalytic phenomenology. We envisioned this framework as a depth psychology of personal experience, purified of the mechanistic reifications of Freudian metapsychology. Our framework took the experiential world of the individual as its central theoretical construct. We assumed no impersonal psychical agencies or motivational prime movers to explain the experiential world. Instead, we assumed that this world evolves organically from the person’s encounter with the critical formative experiences that constitute his or her unique life history. Once established, it becomes discernible in the distinctive, recurrent patterns; themes; and invariant meanings that prereflectively organize the person’s experiences. Psychoanalytic phenomenology entailed a set of interpretative principles for investigating the nature, origins, purposes, and transformations of the configurations of self and other pervading a person’s experiential world. Importantly, our dedication to illuminating personal phenomenology had led us from Cartesian minds to emotional worlds and, thus, from mental contents to relational contexts, from the intrapsychic to the intersubjective. Phenomenology had led us inexorably to contextualism. Once we had rethought psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry, a focus on the mutually enriching interface of psychoanalysis and Continental phenomenology became inescapable, and I began reading phenomenological philosophy voraciously. In 2000, I formed a leaderless philosophical study group in which we devoted a year to a close reading of Heidegger’s (1927=1962) Being and Time. A second nodal point for me occurred when I turned my attention to the phenomenology of emotional trauma in the wake of the death of my late wife, Dede, in 1991—a massive trauma that shattered my world. The close study of Being and Time in 2000 proved to be critical. On one hand, Heidegger’s ontological contextualism (Being-in-the-world) seemed to provide a solid philosophical grounding for our psychoanalytic phenomenological contextualism. Even more important to me at the time, Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of angst, world-collapse, uncanniness, and thrownness into Being-toward-death provided me with extraordinary philosophical tools for grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma. It was this latter discovery that motivated me to begin doctoral studies in philosophy and to write a dissertation and two books (Stolorow 2007, 2011) on Heidegger and what I came to call post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. My dual aim in this work has been to show both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy. It is to this dual aim that I now turn. POST-CARTESIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS Both Binswanger and Boss applied Heidegger’s analysis of existence to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis proceeding from the top down—that is, they started with Heidegger’s philosophical HEIDEGGER AND POST-CARTESIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS 211 delineation of essential existential structures and applied these to clinical phenomena and the therapeutic situation. Although Binswanger’s (1946=1958) existential analysis produced some brilliant phenomenological descriptions of the ‘‘world-designs’’ (p. 213) underlying various forms of psychopathology, and Boss’s (1963) Daseinanalysis freed the psychoanalytic theory of therapy from the dehumanizing causal-mechanistic assumptions of Freudian metapsychology, neither effort, in my view, brought about a radicalization of psychoanalytic practice itself or of the psychoanalytic process. The evolution of my collaborators’ and my post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective, by contrast, proceeded from the bottom up. Born, as I have said, of our studies of the subjective origins of psychoanalytic theories, it developed out of our concurrent efforts to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry and to illuminate the phenomenology of the psychoanalytic process itself. Post-Cartesian psychoanalysis is a phenomenological contextualism. It is phenomenological in that it investigates and illuminates organizations or worlds of emotional experience. It is contextual in that it holds that such organizations of emotional experience take form, both developmentally and in the psychoanalytic situation, in constitutive relational or intersubjective contexts. Heidegger’s ontological perspective, as I see it, is also a phenomenologicalcontextualist one, crystallizing contrapuntally from his ongoing dialogue with the philosophers of traditional metaphysics and epistemology—most prominently, Descartes. This feature of Heidegger’s thought is of central importance for post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. FROM MIND TO WORLD In Descartes’s (1641=1989) metaphysical dualism, mind is ontologically isolated from the world in which it dwells, just as the world is purged of all human significance, and both are beheld in their bare thinghood. Traditional Freudian theory is pervaded by the Cartesian ‘‘myth of the isolated mind’’ (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 7), which bifurcates the experiential world into inner and outer regions, severs both mind from body and cognition from affect, reifies and absolutizes the resulting divisions, and pictures the mind as an objective entity that takes its place among other objects, a thinking thing that has an inside with contents and that looks out on an external which it is essentially estranged. Freud’s psychoanalysis greatly expanded the Cartesian mind to include a vast unconscious realm. Nevertheless, the Freudian psyche remained a Cartesian mind, a self-enclosed mental apparatus containing and working over mental contents, a thinking thing that, precisely because it is a thing, is ontologically decontextualized, fundamentally separated from its world. Post-Cartesian psychoanalysis, by contrast, is a phenomenological contextualism that investigates and illuminates emotional experience as it takes form within constitutive relational contexts. From a post-Cartesian perspective, all the phenomena that have been the focus of psychoanalytic investigation are grasped not as products of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms, but as forming within systems constituted by interacting worlds of emotional experience. This phenomenological contextualism finds solid philosophical grounding in Heidegger’s ontological contextualism. In his hermeneutic of Dasein, Heidegger sought interpretively to refind the unity of our Being, split asunder in the Cartesian bifurcation. His contextualism was formally indicated early on, in his designation of the human being as Dasein, to-be-there or to-be-situated, a term that already points to the unity of the human kind of Being and its context. This initially indicated 212 STOLOROW contextualization is further fleshed out as Heidegger focused his inquiry on our average everyday understanding of our kind of Being. His aim was to ‘‘lay bare a fundamental structure in Dasein: Being-in-the-world’’ (Heidegger, 1927=1962, p. 65), Dasein’s ‘‘constitutive state’’ (p. 78). With the hyphens unifying the expression Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), Heidegger indicated that in his interpretation of Dasein the traditional ontological gap between our Being and our world is to be definitively closed and that, in their indissoluble unity, our Being and our world always already contextualize one another. His analytic of Dasein unveils the basic structure of our human kind of Being as a rich contextual whole, in which human Being is saturated with the world in which we dwell, and the world we inhabit is drenched in human significance. In light of this fundamental contextualization, Heidegger’s consideration of affectivity is especially noteworthy. FROM DRIVE TO AFFECTIVITY Heidegger’s term for the existential ground of affectivity is Befindlichkeit. Literally, the word might be translated as ‘‘how-one-finds-oneself-ness.’’ As Gendlin (1988) has pointed out, Heidegger’s word for the structure of affectivity denotes both how one feels and the situation within which one is feeling, a felt sense of oneself in a situation, prior to a Cartesian split between inside and outside. Befindlichkeit is disclosive of our always already having been delivered over to the situatedness in which we find ourselves, and it shows up ontically as mood (Stimmung), through which we are attuned to ourselves and to our embeddedness in the world. I have contended (Stolorow, 2013) that for Heidegger, mood was a term of art referring to the whole range of disclosive affectivity. The concepts of Befindlichkeit and disclosive affectivity underscore the exquisite context-dependence and context-sensitivity of emotional experience, a context-embeddedness that takes on enormous importance in view of post-Cartesian psychoanalysis’s placing of affectivity at the motivational center of human psychological life. It is a central tenet of post-Cartesian psychoanalysis that a shift in psychoanalytic thinking from the motivational primacy of instinctual drive to the motivational primacy of affectivity moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism and a central focus on dynamic relational systems. Unlike drives, which in Freudian psychoanalysis were claimed to originate deep within the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind, affectivity is something that, from birth onward, is coconstituted within ongoing relational systems. Therefore, locating affect at their motivational center automatically entails a radical contextualization of virtually all aspects of human psychological life and of the psychoanalytic process. Nowhere is this contextualization seen more clearly than in the understanding of emotional trauma. TRAUMA, ANXIETY, FINITUDE From a post-Cartesian perspective, developmental trauma is viewed, not as an instinctual flooding of an ill-equipped Cartesian container, as Freud (1926=1959) would have it, but as an experience of unbearable affect. Furthermore, the intolerability of affect states can be fully grasped only in terms of the relational systems in which they are felt. Developmental trauma originates within a formative relational context whose central feature is malattunement to painful affect— the absence of a context of human understanding in which that pain can be held and endured. HEIDEGGER AND POST-CARTESIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS 213 Without such a relational home for the child’s emotional pain, it can only be felt as unbearable, overwhelming, disorganizing. Painful or frightening affect becomes lastingly traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance and integration is profoundly absent. Two years prior to beginning to study Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927=1962), I wrote a description of a traumatized state that I experienced at a conference in 1992, at which I relived the terrible loss of my late wife, Dede, who had died 20 months earlier. An initial batch of copies of my newly published book, Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992), was sent hot off the press to a display table at the conference. I picked up a copy and looked around excitedly for Dede, who would be so pleased and happy to see it. She was, of course, nowhere to be found. I had awakened the morning of February 23, 1991 to find her lying dead across our bed, 4 weeks after her metastatic cancer had been diagnosed. Spinning around to show her my book and finding her gone instantly transported me back to that devastating moment in which I found her dead and my world was shattered,1 and I was once again consumed with horror and sorrow. Here is how I described my traumatized state: There was a dinner at that conference for all the panelists, many of whom were my old and good friends and close colleagues. Yet, as I looked around the ballroom, they all seemed like strange and alien beings to me. Or more accurately, I seemed like a strange and alien being—not of this world. The others seemed so vitalized, engaged with one another in a lively manner. I, in contrast, felt deadened and broken, a shell of the man I had once been. An unbridgeable gulf seemed to open up, separating me forever from my friends and colleagues. They could never even begin to fathom my experience, I thought to myself, because we now lived in altogether different worlds. (Stolorow, 1999, pp. 464–465) In the years following that painful experience at the conference dinner, I was able to recognize similar feelings in my patients who had suffered severe traumatization. I sought to comprehend and conceptualize the dreadful sense of alienation and estrangement that seemed to me to be inherent to the experience of emotional trauma. The key that I found that for me unlocked the meaning of trauma was what I came to call ‘‘the absolutisms of everyday life’’ (Stolorow, 1999): When a person says to a friend, ‘‘I’ll see you later,’’ or a parent says to a child at bedtime, ‘‘I’ll see you in the morning,’’ these are statements . . . whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naı̈ve realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable. It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of Being-in-theworld. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes ‘‘the unbearable embeddedness of Being.’’ . . . As a result, the traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness. It is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form. (p. 467) 1 Borrowing a term from Harry Potter, I call such experiences portkeys to trauma (Stolorow, 2007, 2011). 214 STOLOROW Some two years after writing these words I read passages in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927=1962) devoted to Heidegger’s existential analysis of angst, and I nearly fell off my chair. Both Heidegger’s phenomenological description and ontological account of angst bore a remarkable resemblance to what I had written about the phenomenology and meaning of emotional trauma. Thus, Heidegger’s existential philosophy—in particular, his existential analysis of angst—enables us to grasp trauma’s existential significance. Like Freud, Heidegger made a sharp distinction between fear and anxiety. Whereas, according to Heidegger, that in the face of which one fears is a definite ‘‘entity within-the-world’’ (Heidegger, 1927=1962, p. 231), that in the face of which one is anxious is ‘‘completely indefinite’’ (p. 231) and turns out to be ‘‘Being-in-the-world as such’’ (p. 230). The indefiniteness of anxiety ‘‘tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. . . . [The world] collapses into itself [and] has the character of completely lacking significance’’ (p. 231). Heidegger made clear that it is the significance of the average everyday world, the world as constituted by the public interpretedness of the ‘‘they’’ (das Man), whose collapse is disclosed in anxiety. Furthermore, insofar as the ‘‘utter insignificance’’ (p. 231) of the everyday world is disclosed in anxiety, anxiety includes a feeling of uncanniness, in the sense of ‘‘not-being-at-home’’ (p. 233). In anxiety, the experience of ‘‘Being-at-home [in one’s tranquilized] everyday familiarity’’ (p. 233) with the publicly interpreted world collapses, and ‘‘Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of . . . ‘uncanniness’’’ (p. 233). In Heidegger’s (1927=1962) ontological account of anxiety, the central features of its phenomenology—the collapse of everyday significance and the resulting feeling of uncanniness—are claimed to be grounded in what he called authentic (nonevasively owned) Being-toward-death. Existentially, death is not simply an event that has not yet occurred or that happens to others, as das Man would have it. Rather, it is a distinctive possibility that is constitutive of our existence—of our intelligibility to ourselves in our futurity and our finitude. It is ‘‘the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all’’ (p. 307), which, because it is both certain and indefinite as to its when, always impends as a constant threat, robbing us of the tranquilizing illusions that characterize our absorption in the everyday world, nullifying its significance for us. The appearance of anxiety indicates that the fundamental defensive purpose (fleeing) of average everydayness has failed and that authentic Being-toward-death has broken through the evasions that conceal it. Torn from the sheltering illusions of das Man, we feel uncanny—no longer safely at home. I have contended that emotional trauma produces an affective state whose features bear a close similarity to the central elements in Heidegger’s existential interpretation of anxiety and that it accomplishes this by plunging the traumatized person into a form of authentic Being-toward-death (Stolorow, 2007). Trauma shatters the illusions of everyday life that evade and cover up the finitude, contingency, and embeddedness of our existence and the indefiniteness of its certain extinction. Such shattering exposes what had been heretofore concealed, thereby plunging the traumatized person into a form of authentic Being-toward-death and into the anxiety—the loss of significance, the uncanniness—through which authentic Being-towarddeath is disclosed. Trauma, like death, individualizes us, in a manner that invariably manifests in an excruciating sense of singularity and solitude. The particular form of authentic Being-toward-death that crystallized in the wake of the trauma of Dede’s death I characterize as a Being-toward-loss. Loss of loved ones constantly impends for me as a certain, indefinite, and ever-present possibility, in terms of which I now HEIDEGGER AND POST-CARTESIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS 215 always understand myself and my world. My own experience of traumatic loss and its aftermath was a source of motivation for my efforts to relationalize Heidegger’s conception of finitude, to which efforts I now turn. THE RELATIONALITY OF FINITUDE It is implicit in Heidegger’s ontological account that authentic existing presupposes a capacity to dwell in the emotional pain—the existential anxiety—that accompanies a nonevasive owning up to human finitude. It follows from my claims about the context-embeddedness of emotional trauma that this capacity entails that such pain can find a relational home in which it can be held. What makes such dwelling and holding possible? Vogel provided a compelling answer to this question by elaborating what he claimed to be a relational dimension of the experience of finitude. Just as finitude is fundamental to our existential constitution, so too is it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as ‘‘brothers and sisters in the same dark night’’ (Vogel, 1994, p. 97), deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common finitude. Thus, although the possibility of emotional trauma is ever present, so too is the possibility of forming bonds of deep emotional attunement within which devastating emotional pain can be held, endured, and eventually integrated. Our existential kinship-in-the-same-darkness is the condition for the possibility both of the profound contextuality of emotional trauma and of the mutative power of human understanding. Critchley (2002) pointed the way toward a second, essential dimension of the relationality of finitude: I would want to [emphasize] the fundamentally relational character of finitude, namely that death is first and foremost experienced as a relation to the death or dying of the other and others, in Being-with the dying in a caring way, and in grieving after they are dead. . . . [O]ne watches the person one loves . . . die and become a lifeless material thing. . . . [T]here is a thing—a corpse—at the heart of the experience of finitude . . . [which is] fundamentally relational. (pp. 169–170) Authentic Being-toward-death entails owning up not only to one’s own finitude, but also to the finitude of all those we love. Hence, authentic Being-toward-death always includes Beingtoward-loss as a central constituent. Just as, existentially, we are ‘‘always dying already’’ (Heidegger, 1927=1962, p. 298), so too are we always already grieving. Death and loss are existentially equiprimordial. Existential anxiety anticipates both death and loss. Support for my claim about the equiprimordiality of death and loss can be found in the work of Derrida (1997), who contended that every friendship is structured from its beginning, a priori, by the possibility that one of the two friends will die first and that the surviving friend will be left to mourn: ‘‘To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, . . . is to know in a more intense way, already injured, . . . that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die’’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 107). Finitude and the possibility of mourning are constitutive of every friendship. In loss, all possibilities for Being in relation to the lost loved one are extinguished. Traumatic loss shatters one’s emotional world, and, insofar as one dwells in the region of such loss, one feels eradicated. As Derrida (2001) claimed, ‘‘Death takes from us not only some particular life 216 STOLOROW within the world [but] someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up’’ (p. 107). EXPANDING HEIDEGGER’S CONCEPTION OF RELATIONALITY Authentic relationality or ‘‘Being-with’’ (Mitsein; Heidegger, 1927=1962, p. 149) is largely restricted in Heidegger’s philosophy to a form of ‘‘solicitude’’ (Fursorge; p. 158) that welcomes and encourages the other’s individualized selfhood. Here I expand Heidegger’s conception of authentic solicitude by showing that it entails the existential kinship-in-finitude that I, along with Vogel, claim is constitutive of our Being-with one another. Authentic solicitude, in Heidegger’s account, frees the other to exist authentically, for the sake of his or her ownmost possibilities of Being. But recall that, for Heidegger, being free for one’s ownmost possibilities also always means being free for one’s uttermost possibility—the possibility of death—and for the existential anxiety that discloses it. So if we are to ‘‘leap ahead’’ (Heidegger, 1927=1962, p. 158) of the other, freeing him or her for his or her ownmost possibilities, we must also free him or her for an authentic Being-toward-death and for a readiness for the anxiety that discloses it. Therefore, according to my claims about the contextuality of emotional life, we must Be-with—that is, attune to—the other’s existential anxiety and other painful affect states disclosive of his or her finitude, thereby providing these feelings with a relational home in which they can be held, so that he or she can seize upon his or her ownmost possibilities in the face of them. Authentic solicitude—a central component of friendship, love, and a therapeutic attitude—can be shown to entail one of the constitutive dimensions of deep human bonding, in which we value the alterity of the other as it is manifested in his or her own distinctive affectivity. Such an attitude enables individual emotional worlds to shine forth in all their richness, diversity, and context-embeddedness. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS Grasping our kinship-in-finitude holds, as Vogel (1994) conveyed, significant ethical implications in so far as it motivates us, or even obligates us, to attune to and provide a relational home for others’ existential vulnerability and pain. Imagine a society in which the obligation to provide a relational home for the emotional pain that is inherent to the traumatizing impact of our finitude has become a shared ethical principle. In such a society, human beings would be much more capable of living in their existential vulnerability, anxiety, and grief, rather than having to revert to the defensive, destructive evasions of them that have been so characteristic of human history. In such a societal context, a new form of identity would become possible, based on owning, rather than covering up, our existential vulnerability. Vulnerability that finds a hospitable relational home could be seamlessly and constitutively integrated into whom we experience ourselves as being. A new form of human solidarity would also become possible, rooted not in shared destructive ideology, but in shared recognition and respect for our common human finitude. If we can help one another bear the darkness, rather than evade it, perhaps one day we will be able to see the light. In writing this article, I have become aware of the trajectory of my work over the past four decades. My commitment to phenomenological inquiry has led me (and my collaborators) to an HEIDEGGER AND POST-CARTESIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS 217 understanding of the contextuality of emotional experience and of the existential significance of emotional trauma, and, in turn, to an awareness of the ethical implications of this understanding. Traveling along this trajectory, I have circled back to a view of our calling that I have long held: Psychoanalysis is neither a branch of medicine nor of psychology; it is applied philosophy. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article presents an overview of some of the basic ideas in my book, World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011). REFERENCES Binswanger, L. (1958). The existential analysis school of thought (E. Angel, Trans.). In R. May, E. Angel, & H. Ellenberger (Eds.), Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology (pp. 191–213). New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1946) Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis (L. Lefebre, Trans.). New York: Basic Books. Critchley, S. (2002). Enigma variations: An interpretation of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Ratio, 15, 154–175. Derrida, J. (1997). Politics of friendship (G. Collins, Trans.). New York: Verso. Derrida, J. (2001). The work of mourning (P.-A. Brault & M. Naas, Eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Descartes, R. (1989). Meditations. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (Original work published 1641) Freud, S. (1959). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 20, pp. 77–175). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1926) Gendlin, E. T. (1988). Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the philosophy of psychology. In K. Hoeller (Ed.), Heidegger and psychology (pp. 43–71). Seattle, WA: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927) Stolorow, R. D. (1999). The phenomenology of trauma and the absolutisms of everyday life: A personal journey. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 16, 464–468. Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections. New York: Routledge. Stolorow, R. D. (2011). World, affectivity, trauma: Heidegger and post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Stolorow, R. D. (2013). Heidegger, mood, and the lived body: The ontical and the ontological. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 13(2), 5–12. Stolorow, R. D., & Atwood, G. E. (1979). Faces in a cloud: Subjectivity in personality theory. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Stolorow, R. D., & Atwood, G. E. (1992). Contexts of being: The intersubjective foundations of psychological life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Vogel, L. (1994). The fragile ‘‘we’’: Ethical implications of Heidegger’s being and time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. AUTHOR NOTE Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., is a Founding Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York City. He is the author of World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011) and Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Routledge, 2007) and coauthor of eight 218 STOLOROW other books. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Harvard University in 1970, his Certificate in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy from the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, New York City, in 1974, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Riverside in 2007. He received the Distinguished Scientific Award from the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association in 1995, the Haskell Norman Prize for Excellence in Psychoanalysis from the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis in 2011, and the Hans W. Loewald Memorial Award from the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education in 2012.