Robert D. Stolorow | Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (original) (raw)

Books by Robert D. Stolorow

This book demonstrates how the authors have experienced the power of phenomenology in their thera... more This book demonstrates how the authors have experienced the power of phenomenology in their therapeutic work with patients, especially those struggling with horrific trauma; in their encounters with psychological and philosophical theories; and in their efforts to comprehend destructive ideologies and the collective traumas that give rise to them. The Power of Phenomenology presents the trajectory of this work. Each chapter begins with a contribution written by one or both authors, extending the power of phenomenological inquiry to one or more of these diverse contexts. The contributions are followed, one or two at a time, by a dialogue between the authors, illustrating the dialectical process of their long collaboration. The unusual format seeks to bring the phenomenology of their collaborative efforts to life for the reader.

Structures of Subjec vity: Explora ons in Psychoanaly c Phenomenology and Contextualism, is a rev... more Structures of Subjec vity: Explora ons in Psychoanaly c Phenomenology and Contextualism, is a revised and expanded second edi on of a work first published in 1984, which was the first systema c presenta on of the intersubjec ve viewpoint -what George Atwood and Robert Stolorow called psychoanaly c phenomenology -in psychoanalysis. This edi on contains new chapters tracing the further development of their thinking over the ensuing decades and explores the personal origins of their most essen al ideas.

How could the most important philosopher of the 20th century have thrown the weight of his though... more How could the most important philosopher of the 20th century have thrown the weight of his thought behind its most horrifying poli cal movement? That haun ng ques on represents a 'wounding of thinking' (in Blanchot's words), a trauma that philosophers are s ll painfully working through. When the most profound trauma theorist, Robert Stolorow, publishes his work on Heidegger, we should thus all pay a en on. As a psychoanalyst and philosopher, Stolorow shows how the phenomenology of trauma and Heidegger's thinking revealingly illuminate one another. Indeed, for all those wan ng to understand what the rela on between psychoanalysis and existen al philosophy will be in the future, there is no more important work than this deeply thought and clearly wri en medita on on the perils and promise of human finitude." -Iain Thomson"World, Affec vity, Trauma shows how today's psychoanalysis can be deepened and transformed by an encounter with Heidegger's thought -and vice versa. Rather than forcing a philosophical theory onto psychoanaly c prac ce, Robert D. Stolorow puts his careful readings of Heidegger into dialogue with clinical and personal experience, as well as using his own psychological insights to shed light on Heidegger the man. Stolorow makes the case that when we recognize, with Heidegger, that no one is a worldless, Cartesian mind, we can come to understand emo onal and rela onal problems in a contextual, intersubjec ve framework. This perspec ve focuses not on inner drives, but on affects as ways of par cipa ng in the world. As Stolorow argues, a Heideggerian understanding of phenomena such as anxiety, trauma, and mortality can help us develop a 'kinship-in-finitude,' an honest solidarity between vulnerable human beings."-Richard Stolorow's phenomenological contextualism illuminates worlds of emo onal experience as they take form within rela onal contexts. In so doing, he finds an important psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existen al philosophy in the phenomenology of emo onal trauma.

Stolorow, R. D. (2022). Heidegger’s Nietzsche, th by Robert D. Stolorow

Psychology Today, 2012

Verified by Psychology Today Robert D Stolorow Ph.D. Feeling, Relating, Existing Therapy ... more Verified by Psychology Today
Robert D Stolorow Ph.D.
Feeling, Relating, Existing
Therapy
Scientism in Psychotherapy
Show Me the Evidence!

Posted June 22, 2012

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These days, in this Insurance-Company-Driven Age of the Quick Fix, there is much talk in psychotherapy circles of “Evidence-Based Practice.” The application of this slogan has been remarkably devoid of philosophical questioning of the nature of psychotherapeutic practice or of the proper evidence for guiding the therapeutic approach to a suffering human soul.

My collaborators and I (Working-Intersubjectively-Contextualism-Psychoanalytic-Practice) have applied the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phronesis to the practice of psychoanalytic therapy. Techne or technical rationality is the kind of method and knowledge required for the uniform production of things. It is exemplified in the traditional, standardized rules of psychoanalytic technique, especially as these are claimed to apply for all patients, all analysts, all analytic couples, and all relational situations. We argue “that the whole conception of psychoanalysis as technique is wrongheaded … and needs to be rethought” (p. 21). We further suggest that what is needed to ground psychoanalytic practice is not techne but phronesis or practical wisdom. Unlike techne, phronesis is a form of practical understanding that is always oriented to the particular, to the uniqueness of the individual and his or her relational situation.

Traditional psychotherapy research tends to reduce human beings and human relationships to “variables” that can be measured, calculated, and correlated. Such procedures partake of what Heidegger calls the technological way of being or technological form of intelligibility. According to Heidegger, entities as a whole, including human beings, are intelligible in our technological era as meaningless resources to be calculated, stored, and optimized in the quest to conquer the earth. In my view, the technological way of being is also associated with the philosophical stance of scientism—the presupposition, exemplified in the scientific positivism characteristic of much research on change in psychotherapy, that the chief form of valid knowledge is that attained through experimental and quantitative methodology.

Such considerations point to the potential importance of qualitative, rather than quantitative, research. They also bring me back to a tradition in academic personality psychology—the tradition in which I was trained as a clinical psychology doctoral student at Harvard during the mid- and late 1960s—known as personology. This tradition, founded by Henry Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the 1930s, held as its basic premise the claim that knowledge of human personality can be advanced only by the systematic, in-depth study of the individual person. This emphasis on “idiographic,” rather than “nomothetic,” research was a radical departure from the philosophy of science that then dominated, and has continued to dominate, academic psychology in the United States.

I suggest that grasping the practice of psychotherapy as a form of phronesis rather than techne justifies a return to idiographic methods in studies of the psychotherapeutic relationship—methods that can investigate the unique emotional worlds of patient and psychotherapist and the specific intersubjective systems constituted by the interplay between them. It is only such idiographic research, I contend, that can illuminate the rich, complex, living relational nexus in which the psychotherapeutic process takes form.

International Journal of …, 2010

Page 1. Heidegger's Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., Georg... more Page 1. Heidegger's Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., George E. Atwood, Ph.D., and Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D. Following the publication of Being and Time (1927), Heidegger's conception ...

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2010

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. e author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche's metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. e author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche's metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2010

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. e author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche's metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.

Psychoanalytic psychology, 2005

1. This article seeks philosophical and theoretical grounding for a clinical generalization, held... more 1. This article seeks philosophical and theoretical grounding for a clinical generalization, held by the author for more than 20 years, about the contextuality of emotional experience. Three characteristics of emotional experience are said to make its ...

Existential Analysis, 2018

This article examines the relationship between totalitarianism and the metaphysical illusions on... more This article examines the relationship between totalitarianism and the
metaphysical illusions on which it rests. Phenomenological investigation is claimed to
loosen the grip of totalitarian ideology by exposing its origins in the “resurrective”
illusions that seek to overcome the impact of collective trauma. Phenomenology is thus
shown to have emancipatory power.

Psychoanalytic Review, 2012

Our original studies of the subjective origins of personality theories in Faces in a Cloud (Atwoo... more Our original studies of the subjective origins of personality
theories in Faces in a Cloud (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993; Stolorow &
Atwood, 1979) put us on a lifelong path of rethinking psychoanalysis
phenomenologically, hence our early proposals for a
“psychoanalytic phenomenology.” Our unwavering dedication to
phenomenological inquiry, in turn, led us inexorably to the context-
embeddedness of all emotional experience—hence our contextualism.

This book demonstrates how the authors have experienced the power of phenomenology in their thera... more This book demonstrates how the authors have experienced the power of phenomenology in their therapeutic work with patients, especially those struggling with horrific trauma; in their encounters with psychological and philosophical theories; and in their efforts to comprehend destructive ideologies and the collective traumas that give rise to them. The Power of Phenomenology presents the trajectory of this work. Each chapter begins with a contribution written by one or both authors, extending the power of phenomenological inquiry to one or more of these diverse contexts. The contributions are followed, one or two at a time, by a dialogue between the authors, illustrating the dialectical process of their long collaboration. The unusual format seeks to bring the phenomenology of their collaborative efforts to life for the reader.

Structures of Subjec vity: Explora ons in Psychoanaly c Phenomenology and Contextualism, is a rev... more Structures of Subjec vity: Explora ons in Psychoanaly c Phenomenology and Contextualism, is a revised and expanded second edi on of a work first published in 1984, which was the first systema c presenta on of the intersubjec ve viewpoint -what George Atwood and Robert Stolorow called psychoanaly c phenomenology -in psychoanalysis. This edi on contains new chapters tracing the further development of their thinking over the ensuing decades and explores the personal origins of their most essen al ideas.

How could the most important philosopher of the 20th century have thrown the weight of his though... more How could the most important philosopher of the 20th century have thrown the weight of his thought behind its most horrifying poli cal movement? That haun ng ques on represents a 'wounding of thinking' (in Blanchot's words), a trauma that philosophers are s ll painfully working through. When the most profound trauma theorist, Robert Stolorow, publishes his work on Heidegger, we should thus all pay a en on. As a psychoanalyst and philosopher, Stolorow shows how the phenomenology of trauma and Heidegger's thinking revealingly illuminate one another. Indeed, for all those wan ng to understand what the rela on between psychoanalysis and existen al philosophy will be in the future, there is no more important work than this deeply thought and clearly wri en medita on on the perils and promise of human finitude." -Iain Thomson"World, Affec vity, Trauma shows how today's psychoanalysis can be deepened and transformed by an encounter with Heidegger's thought -and vice versa. Rather than forcing a philosophical theory onto psychoanaly c prac ce, Robert D. Stolorow puts his careful readings of Heidegger into dialogue with clinical and personal experience, as well as using his own psychological insights to shed light on Heidegger the man. Stolorow makes the case that when we recognize, with Heidegger, that no one is a worldless, Cartesian mind, we can come to understand emo onal and rela onal problems in a contextual, intersubjec ve framework. This perspec ve focuses not on inner drives, but on affects as ways of par cipa ng in the world. As Stolorow argues, a Heideggerian understanding of phenomena such as anxiety, trauma, and mortality can help us develop a 'kinship-in-finitude,' an honest solidarity between vulnerable human beings."-Richard Stolorow's phenomenological contextualism illuminates worlds of emo onal experience as they take form within rela onal contexts. In so doing, he finds an important psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existen al philosophy in the phenomenology of emo onal trauma.

Psychology Today, 2012

Verified by Psychology Today Robert D Stolorow Ph.D. Feeling, Relating, Existing Therapy ... more Verified by Psychology Today
Robert D Stolorow Ph.D.
Feeling, Relating, Existing
Therapy
Scientism in Psychotherapy
Show Me the Evidence!

Posted June 22, 2012

Share on FacebookShare
Share on TwitterTweet
Share via EmailEmail

These days, in this Insurance-Company-Driven Age of the Quick Fix, there is much talk in psychotherapy circles of “Evidence-Based Practice.” The application of this slogan has been remarkably devoid of philosophical questioning of the nature of psychotherapeutic practice or of the proper evidence for guiding the therapeutic approach to a suffering human soul.

My collaborators and I (Working-Intersubjectively-Contextualism-Psychoanalytic-Practice) have applied the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phronesis to the practice of psychoanalytic therapy. Techne or technical rationality is the kind of method and knowledge required for the uniform production of things. It is exemplified in the traditional, standardized rules of psychoanalytic technique, especially as these are claimed to apply for all patients, all analysts, all analytic couples, and all relational situations. We argue “that the whole conception of psychoanalysis as technique is wrongheaded … and needs to be rethought” (p. 21). We further suggest that what is needed to ground psychoanalytic practice is not techne but phronesis or practical wisdom. Unlike techne, phronesis is a form of practical understanding that is always oriented to the particular, to the uniqueness of the individual and his or her relational situation.

Traditional psychotherapy research tends to reduce human beings and human relationships to “variables” that can be measured, calculated, and correlated. Such procedures partake of what Heidegger calls the technological way of being or technological form of intelligibility. According to Heidegger, entities as a whole, including human beings, are intelligible in our technological era as meaningless resources to be calculated, stored, and optimized in the quest to conquer the earth. In my view, the technological way of being is also associated with the philosophical stance of scientism—the presupposition, exemplified in the scientific positivism characteristic of much research on change in psychotherapy, that the chief form of valid knowledge is that attained through experimental and quantitative methodology.

Such considerations point to the potential importance of qualitative, rather than quantitative, research. They also bring me back to a tradition in academic personality psychology—the tradition in which I was trained as a clinical psychology doctoral student at Harvard during the mid- and late 1960s—known as personology. This tradition, founded by Henry Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the 1930s, held as its basic premise the claim that knowledge of human personality can be advanced only by the systematic, in-depth study of the individual person. This emphasis on “idiographic,” rather than “nomothetic,” research was a radical departure from the philosophy of science that then dominated, and has continued to dominate, academic psychology in the United States.

I suggest that grasping the practice of psychotherapy as a form of phronesis rather than techne justifies a return to idiographic methods in studies of the psychotherapeutic relationship—methods that can investigate the unique emotional worlds of patient and psychotherapist and the specific intersubjective systems constituted by the interplay between them. It is only such idiographic research, I contend, that can illuminate the rich, complex, living relational nexus in which the psychotherapeutic process takes form.

International Journal of …, 2010

Page 1. Heidegger's Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., Georg... more Page 1. Heidegger's Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., George E. Atwood, Ph.D., and Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D. Following the publication of Being and Time (1927), Heidegger's conception ...

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2010

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. e author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche's metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. e author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche's metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2010

Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. e author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche's metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.

Psychoanalytic psychology, 2005

1. This article seeks philosophical and theoretical grounding for a clinical generalization, held... more 1. This article seeks philosophical and theoretical grounding for a clinical generalization, held by the author for more than 20 years, about the contextuality of emotional experience. Three characteristics of emotional experience are said to make its ...

Existential Analysis, 2018

This article examines the relationship between totalitarianism and the metaphysical illusions on... more This article examines the relationship between totalitarianism and the
metaphysical illusions on which it rests. Phenomenological investigation is claimed to
loosen the grip of totalitarian ideology by exposing its origins in the “resurrective”
illusions that seek to overcome the impact of collective trauma. Phenomenology is thus
shown to have emancipatory power.

Psychoanalytic Review, 2012

Our original studies of the subjective origins of personality theories in Faces in a Cloud (Atwoo... more Our original studies of the subjective origins of personality
theories in Faces in a Cloud (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993; Stolorow &
Atwood, 1979) put us on a lifelong path of rethinking psychoanalysis
phenomenologically, hence our early proposals for a
“psychoanalytic phenomenology.” Our unwavering dedication to
phenomenological inquiry, in turn, led us inexorably to the context-
embeddedness of all emotional experience—hence our contextualism.

Psychoanalytic review, 2012

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2021

In this article I offer some existential-phenomenological reflections on the interrelationships a... more In this article I offer some existential-phenomenological reflections on the interrelationships among the forms of love, loss, finitude, and the human ways of being.

Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 2021

I wonder whether Riker is familiar with the thinking of George S. Klein, whose work was published... more I wonder whether Riker is familiar with the thinking of George S. Klein, whose work was published posthumously in 1976, a year before Kohut's formal christening of self psychology and its bipolar self. Klein, like Kohut, was a psychoanalytic radical who had a major impact on my viewpoint. Klein (1976) claimed that Freud's psychoanalytic theory actually amalgamates two theories-a metapsychology and a clinical theory-deriving from two different universes of discourse. Freudian metapsychology deals with the material substrate of experience and is couched in the natural science framework of impersonal structures, forces, and energies. Freudian clinical theory, by contrast, deals with intentionality and the unconscious meanings of personal experience, seen from the perspective of the individual's unique life history. Clinical psychoanalysis asks "why" questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks "how" questions and seeks answers in terms of the nonexperiential realm of impersonal mechanisms and causes. Klein sought to disentangle metapsychological and clinical concepts, retaining only the latter as the legitimate content of psychoanalytic theory. For Klein, the essential psychoanalytic enterprise involves the reading of disclaimed intentionality and the unlocking of unconscious meanings from a person's experience, a task for which the concepts of the clinical theory, purged of metapsychological contaminants, are uniquely suited. Klein's proposals for a radical theorectomy for psychoanalysis have significantly influenced such contemporary thinkers as Merton Gill, Roy Schafer, and those, including George Atwood and myself (Stolorow & Atwood, 2018), who have sought to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. Expanding on Klein's distinction, I would characterize psychoanalytic clinical theory as emotional phenomenology and psychoanalytic metapsychology as a form of metaphysics, in that it postulates ultimate realities and universal truths. I contend that this division is characteristic of all the major psychoanalytic theories-they are mixtures of emotional phenomenology and metaphysics. Emotional phenomenology embodies the tragic, in that emotional experiencing is finite, transient, contextdependent, ever changing and decaying. Metapsychology evades the tragic through metaphysical illusion. Phenomenology/metaphysics is a trauma-driven binary. Wait, Kohut proposed his own radical theorectomy for psychoanalysis, in a truly remarkable essay, seventeen years before Klein-"Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis: An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory" (Kohut, 1959)-one of my favorites. There he contended that the domain of psychoanalytic inquiry is defined and delimited by its method of observation, which always relies on introspection and empathy. Only that which is in principle accessible to empathy and introspection belongs within the realm of psychoanalytic investigation and theorizing. Stunningly, for example, he suggests that the drives should be excised and only the experience of drivenness retained-a suggestion foreshadowing my own proposal-which has Riker and many others up in arms-to excise the self and retain only the experience of selfhood. The objectification of the experiencing of selfhood serves to render stable and solid a sense of personal identity otherwise subject to discontinuity, uncertainty, and fragmentation. A phenomenological-contextualist viewpoint, by contrast, embraces the vulnerability and context-dependence of human existence.

Metalepsis, 2021

In this article I distinguish between the existential anxiety evoked by a confrontation with huma... more In this article I distinguish between the existential anxiety evoked by a confrontation with human finitude and what I call Apocalyptic anxiety signaling the end of human civilization itself. The end of civilization would terminate the historical process that gives meaning to individual existence. Apocalyptic anxiety announces the collapse of all meaningfulness, a possibility so horrifying that it commonly leads to evasion of its source.

Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 2021

Dismantling of metaphysical illusion is central to the phenomenology of trauma.

Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 1993

Intersubjectivity theory is a field theory or systems theory whose central metaphor is the larger... more Intersubjectivity theory is a field theory or systems theory whose central metaphor is the larger relational system--what we call the intersubjective field or context--in which psychological phenomena crystallize. Ours is a vocabulary of interacting subjectivities, colliding organizing principles, reciprocal mutual influence, attunements and malattunements, conjunctions and disjunctions--a lexicon attempting to capture the shifting intersubjective context of intrapsychic experience. Phenomena that have been the traditional focus of psychoanalytic investigation are viewed, from an intersubjective perspective, not as products of isolated intrapsychic processes but as forming at the interface of interacting worlds of experience.

Language and Psychoanalysis, 2021

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.-Ludw... more Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.-Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953, section 109

Language and Psychoanalysis, 2021

When an illusory picture is imagined as ultimately real, the word has become transformed into a m... more When an illusory picture is imagined as ultimately real, the word has become transformed into a metaphysical entity. In place of the “muddied” view given by contexts of use—finite, contingent, unstable, transient—one can imagine the clear outlines of an everlasting entity. Metaphysical illusion, mediated by reified pictures, replaces the finitude and transience of existence with a God’s-eye view of an irreducibly absolute and eternally changeless reality. A bewitchment of intelligence by language is thereby accomplished, whereby one’s prereflective experience of language shapes one’s sense of the real.In the present essay we explore a form of witchery aimed at forging a sense of unity from incompatible visions of reality—namely, the formation of oxymoronic hybrids.

Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 2020

Language co-creates the reality it names by allowing it to show up in experience as something in... more Language co-creates the reality it names by allowing it to show up in experience as something intelligible. From the constitutive perspective language is inherently interpretive, not merely descriptive. Language transforms reality by introducing a new way of disclosing it, thereby introducing new ways of being. The meanings provided by language are always constitutive of experience and never merely designative.

Human Studies, 2020

Scharff’s study of Heidegger’s earlier lectures and their debt to Dilthey’s phenomenology allow o... more Scharff’s study of Heidegger’s earlier lectures and their debt to Dilthey’s
phenomenology allow one to recognize the Diltheyan influences that pervade Being and Time, undistracted by Husserl’s super-Cartesianism.

Human Studies, 2012

De Mul’s central thesis is that Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason can be understood as a ra... more De Mul’s central thesis is that Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason can be understood as a radicalization of Kant’s recognition of the contingency and finitude of human reason.

American Imago, 2020

The author develops the claim that humans characteristically maintain a sense of protectedness by... more The author develops the claim that humans characteristically maintain a sense of protectedness by creating various forms of metaphysical illusion, replacing the tragic finitude and transience of human existence with a permanent and eternally changeless reality. One such illusion forms around planet earth itself, transformed into an indestructible metaphysical entity. It has become increasingly difficult, in the face of the ravages of climate change, to maintain the illusion of earth’s indestructibility, and with it, a sense of safety. The author refers to the feelings evoked by the crumbling of metaphysical illusion as Apocalyptic anxiety¬—the dread of the end of human civilization. This Apocalyptic dread needs to be confronted (not evaded) in a comportment of dwelling—with our vulnerable planet and with our vulnerable fellow human beings.

Clio's Psyche, 2025

Abstract: This essay illuminates the generative unity formed by psychobiographical inquiry and e... more Abstract: This essay illuminates the generative unity formed by psychobiographical inquiry and emotional phenomenology. This generative unity is vividly illustrated in a study of the work and emotional life of C. G. Jung.

Bringing Death to Life in Psychoanalysis, 2025

The contemporary analysis of human existence fills us all with a sense of fragility, with the pow... more The contemporary analysis of human existence fills us all with a sense of fragility, with the power of dark instincts, with the suffering caused by mysteries and illusions, and with the finitude shown by all that is living, even where the highest creations of communal life arise from it."-Wilhelm Dilthey (1883).

Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, 2022

This chapter develops the thesis that the essence of psychoanalysis lies in emotional phenomenology.

Trauma Psychology News, 2024

The specter of climate change confronts us with the destruction of not just individual lives but ... more The specter of climate change confronts us with the destruction of not just individual lives but of human civilization itself; and the destruction of human civilization would also terminate the historical process, through which we make sense of our individual existences.

Trauma Psychology News, 2024

The specter of climate change confronts us with the destruction of not just individual lives but ... more The specter of climate change confronts us with the destruction of not just individual lives but of human civilization itself; and the destruction of human civilization would also terminate the historical process, through which we make sense of our individual existences.

Trauma Psychology News, 2023

"I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER," a lover proclaims to a beloved. Love thereby transforms the beloved in... more "I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER," a lover proclaims to a beloved. Love thereby transforms the beloved into a metaphysical entity, replacing the finitude and impermanence of existence with the illusion of eternity. When a beloved dies, not only is the relationship lost; the metaphysical illusion of its permanence and indestructibility crumbles. Such crumbling of metaphysical illusion lies at the heart of emotional trauma.

Heidegger Yahrbuch: Heidegger und die Psychiatrie, ed. A. Denker. M. Groth, et al., 2023

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2011

Over the course of some 35 years, our work has been centrally devoted to liberating psychoana... more Over the course of some 35 years, our work has been centrally
devoted to liberating psychoanalytic theory and practice from various
forms of Cartesian, isolated-mind thinking en route to a post-
Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective. We would characterize the
essence of a post-Cartesian psychoanalytic framework as its being a
phenomenological contextualism (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002). 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.

Language and Psychoanalysis, 2021

Wittgenstein’s account of how language bewitches one’s intelligence is a singular achievement in ... more Wittgenstein’s account of how language bewitches one’s intelligence is a singular achievement in the phenomenology of language. In section 426 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously claims that the meaning of a word is to be found in the “actual use” of it, and he contrasts this understanding with the projection of a picture: A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied. ... [T]he form of expression we use seems to have been designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole of each of those infinite series and he sees into human consciousness. (Wittgenstein, 1953, section 426)

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2022

Reproduced below you will find the transcript of the interview I, Peter Maduro, conducted of Robe... more Reproduced below you will find the transcript of the interview I, Peter Maduro, conducted of Robert Stolorow, on April 17, 2021, respecting the forty-plus year history and conceptual development of his theory of emotional trauma. My interview of Dr. Stolorow was the centerpiece of an international on-line program co-sponsored by the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, in West Los Angeles, CA (ICP), and Psychoanalytic Inquiry (PI). (This program is available for viewing in its entirety upon request to ICP.) Around 1996, as soon as I began my clinical psychotherapy practice as a psych-intern here in West Los Angeles, CA, I joined one of Bob Stolorow's clinical supervision groups. Toward the end of my first case presentation to Bob in that group he asked me what transference implications I saw in my patient's trauma-soaked emotional experience. After a brief self-conscious hesitation, I replied, "What is transference?" Over the twenty-five-plus years since that first meeting with Bob, and that first encounter with the notion of trauma transferences, I have been steeped in Bob's elucidation of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological-contextual inquiry, including notably his phenomenological-contextual inquiry into emotional trauma, and its literature. I have also been deeply affected by him as a person. Just during this time that I have known Bob, his psychoanalytic inquiries, including his distinctive illuminations in the phenomenology and contextuality of trauma that are the focus of my below interview, have borne the fruit of 5 books. 1 Each of these works is richly interdisciplinary at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. I hold myself quite privileged to have been at a place and timenamely, West Los Angeles from the mid-1990ʹs to the present-in which Bob's progressive contributions to psychoanalytic understandings of trauma washed over me implicitly and explicitly as a person. They washed over me as a young boy who lost his father within a family system of denial, as Stolorow psychotherapy patient, as eager psychotherapist-indevelopment, as ICP psychoanalytic candidate and Stolorow supervisee, and as scholar of relational psychoanalysis, particularly of Bob's and his collaborators' intersubjective-systems framework. Additionally, over the last few years of the coronavirus pandemic, socio-political unrest, and climate change we have all been thrown more forcefully into seeing and feeling our own and our planet earth's vulnerabilities. In this context, I have benefited personally, clinically, and as a citizen of our finite world from Bob's trauma insights as he extended them from the traumatized individual to collective trauma.

Clio's Psyche, 2023

An exploration of shunning reactions to psychobiographical accounts of theoretical ideas, this ar... more An exploration of shunning reactions to psychobiographical accounts of theoretical ideas, this article delves into the question of why this particular reaction is the most widespread, as well as the reactions one of the authors experienced to his own work on Heidegger.

This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis tha... more This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, and for both, philosophical investigation is a way of emancipating thought and life from illusion by bringing what is already prereflectively understood into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of the context-embeddedness and finitude of human existence. It is hoped that comparing the works of these two philosophers will unveil features of each that are more difficult to discern in the works of either considered in isol...

International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 2009

... DOI: 10.1080/15551020902730257 Dr. Robert D. Stolorow Ph.D. a b & Mr. Robert Eli Sanchez ... more ... DOI: 10.1080/15551020902730257 Dr. Robert D. Stolorow Ph.D. a b & Mr. Robert Eli Sanchez Jr. MA c pages 125-131. ... The idea that philosophy as questioning dialogue has a therapeutic aim and impact goes back at least as far as the Socrates of Plato's (2002)5. Plato. 2002. ...

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2016

This essay seeks to characterize an active, relationally engaged form of therapeutic comportment ... more This essay seeks to characterize an active, relationally engaged form of therapeutic comportment called emotional dwelling. Distinctive features of this mode of comportment are identified by contrasting it with corresponding formulations appearing in other theoretical viewpoints, including those of Freud, Ferenczi, Sullivan, and Kohut. Central in emotional dwelling is the therapist's capacity to enter into a patient's reality even while simultaneously holding to his or her own. One of us (Stolorow, 2014) recently offered some formulations moving toward a more active, relationally engaged form of therapeutic comportment called emotional dwelling. In dwelling, one does not merely seek to understand the other's emotional world from the other's perspective. One does that, but much more. In dwelling, essential in the pursuit of our discipline's twin goals of healing psychological wounds and exploring human nature and human existence, one leans into the other's experience and participates in it, with the aid of one's own analogous experiences. In this essay, we seek to further identify distinctive features of this mode of comportment by contrasting it with corresponding formulations appearing in other theoretical points of view. OBJECTIFICATION The antithesis of emotional dwelling is the therapist's attitude of objectification. The most extreme forms of such an attitude are found in crude materialism and behaviorism, wherein the whole concept of the human being as an experiencing subject is abolished. But any way of relating that decontextualizes the experiences being explored objectifies them. Psychiatric diagnosis, for example, ascribes the content and form of the patient's subjective life to particular disorders inhering in an isolated Cartesian mind. Psychoanalytic character types (narcissistic personality, obsessional personality, schizoid personality, etc.), similarly, focus on the patterns of experience and conduct shown by a person seen in isolation from the relational surround. Even the concepts of intersubjective systems, theory can be applied in an objectifying manner, as, for instance, when the patterning of subjective life is ascribed to decontextualized "organizing principles" somehow operating within the mind. Emotional dwelling, in contrast, recognizes the embeddedness of all experience in constitutive intersubjective contexts, including the one created by the act of dwelling itself. We are

Clinical Social Work Journal, 2011

The process of bringing the visceral, bodily aspect of emotional experience into language plays a... more The process of bringing the visceral, bodily aspect of emotional experience into language plays a vital role in the working through of painful emotional states. Such visceral-linguistic unities are achieved in a dialogue of emotional understanding, and it is in such dialogue that experiences of emotional trauma can be held and transformed into endurable and namable painful feelings. The blues is a wonderful example of such dialogue. In the unifying experience of the blues, songwriter, performers, and listeners are joined in a visceral-linguistic conversation in which universally traumatizing aspects of human existence can be communally held and borne. Keywords Blues Á Emotional trauma Á Emotional understanding Á Existential vulnerability Á Slavery Music as Schopenhauer conceived it [speaks] … directly out of the 'abyss' as its most authentic, elemental, nonderivative revelation.-Friedrich Nietzsche I can't stand living, but I'm scared of dying, but Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along.

The Humanistic Psychologist, 2013

This paper tells the story of an intellectual and personal relationship, spanning more than four ... more This paper tells the story of an intellectual and personal relationship, spanning more than four decades. The account begins with a "golden age" period in the 1970s at Rutgers University, where an effort was made to resurrect the personological tradition in psychology under the leadership of Silvan Tomkins. In spite of the eventual failure of this effort, the foundation of our collaboration had been lastingly formed. The focus of the discussion is on a series of epiphanies that occurred, moments of shared inspiration that in each instance gave rise to significant writings over the ensuing years. We also describe the deepening personal connection that was the context of these developments.

Clio's Psyche, 2022

Abstract: After noting how academic philosophers have shunned psychobiography, the author brings... more Abstract: After noting how academic philosophers have shunned psychobiography, the author brings to focus the psychobiographical sources of Martin Heidegger’s “turn” from a hermeneutic phenomenology to a form of metaphysical mysticism.

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2013

Clio's Psyche, 2022

In the introduction to his lecture course on Aristotle, Heidegger (1924/2009) confidently de... more In the introduction to his lecture course on Aristotle, Heidegger (1924/2009) confidently declared: “Regarding the personality of a philosopher, our only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked and that he died” (p. 4). Here I argue to the contrary that an understanding of Heidegger’s personal emotional world is essential to an understanding of the controversial “turn” in his thinking from a hermeneutic phenomenology to a form of metaphysical mysticism.