World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis, by Robert D. Stolorow
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This is simply a stunning work. It drives right to the heart of what it is to be a human being through the mutually reinforcing lenses of Heideggarian existentialism (as articulated in his magnum opus, Being and Time) and Post-Cartesian (i.e. foundationally intersubjective) psychoanalysis. It reminded me of why I loved Heidegger, how powerful his existentialism was for me when I first encountered it several years ago, while simultaneously underlining the powerful (and powerfully dark) heart of Heideggarian existentialism: namely, our encounter with angst, and our Being-toward-death as the fundamental constitutive structure therein revealed, the yawning abyss and nullity at the heart of our ineluctably thrown, fallen existence. At the same time, Stolorow deftly, and often poignantly, draws on Heideggerβs phenomenology of human being to reinforce a psychoanalytic understanding of the human condition that posits intersubjectivity as the essence of experiencing β an anti-Cartesian formulation intended to reunite the res cogitans with the res extensa into an indissoluble unity. And with that understanding, to explicate the time-shattering nature of pathogenic trauma through the lens of (largely parental) failures of authentic Being-with. This is a work to read and reread, for with each pass some new element of your experience comes to light, even though the light may shine on that which is dark and inescapable.