ijp12099

Book and Journal Reviews

World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis

by Robert D. StolorowRoutledge, New York and Hove, 2011; 121 pp; £15.99

Writing is invariably a game of fort-da and, for the past 20 years since Con-texts of Being, Robert Stolorow’s innovative contribution to psychoanalysismay be seen in this way as a work of repetition and remembering. Theoreti-cally, Stolorow’s work exemplifies where post-Kohutian self psychology hasgot to in the form of ‘contextualism’. World, Affectivity, Trauma is a briefand eloquent r�esum�e of this perspective. As with Trauma and Human Exis-tence (2007), the theoretical argument in this case is inextricably linked toautobiographical reflection. The personal drama that animates the book isimplicit in the epigraphs. And so if we complete the sentences, which forsome reason Stolorow cites only in part, and place them in context, we findourselves on the way to the scene of loss that lies at the heart of the book.The first of the two epigraphs is taken from Heidegger’s lecture course of

1929–30, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Part II, chapter 2, para. 44):“As a creative and essential activity of Dasein, philosophy stands in the fun-damental attunement of melancholy”. What does this mean for the concep-tual series of ‘world’, ‘affectivity’ and ‘trauma’? To state the controversy atits most basic, the general implication of Stolorow’s argument is that the‘fundamental attunement’ of philosophizing provides the ground for psy-choanalytic thinking. Of course the danger here is that clinical thinkingbecomes derivative. Consequently, Stolorow attempts to distance himself inthe introductory chapter from the likes of Ludwig Binswanger and MedardBoss, arguing that existential analysis and Daseinanalysis proceed fromphilosophical abstraction to clinical phenomena. By contrast, he maintainsthat the contextualist perspective is rooted in the ‘subjective origins’ of psy-choanalytic theory and practice. Things are nonetheless pitched philosophi-cally in terms of Heidegger’s critique of the Cartesian Cogito as a form ofdas rechnende Denken [‘calculating thinking’]. The aim is to rethink psycho-analysis, in the light of Heidegger’s dismantling of the philosophic tradition,as a form of phenomenological inquiry and, by means of this inquiry, to‘awaken’ the being-there of attunement.This is not exactly new ground; nonetheless, the book raises important

questions about the viability of a therapeutic appropriation of Heidegger.In his phenomenological description of loss and its traumatic impact, Stolo-row assumes the task of ‘awakening’ a fundamental attunement while at thesame time insisting that “our phenomenological emphasis does not in anyway entail abandonment of the exploration of unconsciousness” (p. 20). Wecan see why he insists. For Heidegger, the ‘being-there’ [Dasein] and‘not-being-there’ [Nicht-Dasein] of attunement cannot be understood in

Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95:385–411 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12099

Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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terms of the distinction between ‘consciousness’ and ‘unconsciousness’. Dif-ferentiating ‘awakening’ from ‘ascertaining’ on methodological grounds, He-idegger explicitly bypasses the Freudian distinction ‘conscious/unconscious’.Clearly, Heidegger’s disengagement from any psychoanalytic interpretive

register whatsoever poses problems for Stolorow’s thesis. But coming backto the terms of the epigraph, in the lecture course of 1929–30 Heideggerwas concerned with the ‘fundamental attunement’ of modernity, and by‘melancholy’ he meant the style rather than the thematic content of philoso-phy, Pascal’s ‘arrangement of words’, or how the philosopher has to get hisor her words right. The further point, which is perhaps more germane toStolorow’s argument, concerns the identity of creativity and suffering [Lie-den]. The philosophic–poetic context in this case includes Novalis andNietzsche, but also extends to Heidegger’s readings from the 1920s onwardsof H€olderlin’s odes and hymns as well as the poet’s dialogue with Greektragedy. The phenomenology of trauma, therefore, is framed epigraphicallyby H€olderlin’s exegesis of Sophocles’ Antigone, together with Heidegger’sown reading therein of the choral ‘ode to man’.None of this is explicit in Stolorow. To the contrary, assuming an abso-

lute break between Sein und Zeit and the late work, Stolorow concentratesexclusively on the initial formulation of being in the world, as equivalent toDasein (the being which each of us ‘is’), in support of a post-Cartesian psy-choanalytic perspective. The division of Heidegger’s thought in this way, Ibelieve, is misleading. Indeed, reading between the lines of the first epigraphdemonstrates the extent to which, in Stolorow’s descriptions of loss, we gainaccess to Freud’s Melancholie only through the exegetic–hermeneutic config-uration of Heidegger on Sophocles via H€olderlin. Stolorow, however, is crit-ical of what he sees as the ‘hypostatization’ of being in the late works (pp.99–100), but is nonetheless intent on appropriating the ontology or ‘ana-lytic’ of Dasein contra the so-called “mechanistic reifications of Freudianmetapsychology” (p. 22). The work of Stolorow and his co-authors, begin-ning in the 1970s with the publication of Faces in a Cloud, “has been cen-trally devoted to liberating psychoanalytic theory and practice from variousforms of Cartesian” thought (p. 100). Stolorow’s identification of Freudwith Descartes is evident, for instance, in his and Atwood’s critique of thedoctrine of ‘isolated mind’ in Contexts of Being, and he repeats the basicclaim here that “the Freudian psyche is fundamentally a Cartesian mind”(p. 24). These claims are taken as read. Similarly, theoretical disagreementswith analytic contemporaries are confined to a few footnotes or passingcomments. Most notably, there is no discussion of the different meanings ofthe term and concept ‘intersubjective’ in Stolorow, Benjamin, Ogden, andDonnel Stern.The lack of discussion in itself does not necessarily count against the

book. Theoretical argument alone settles nothing and, indeed, Stolorowmay not have seen any necessity on this occasion to make a case for theCartesian reading of the Freudian subject. The argument can be found else-where. Given the explicit focus of the book, however, one might haveexpected him to argue the case against Descartes. A critique of the Ego asthe basis of philosophical reflection is one thing. But the fact that minds

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live in their own worlds, admitting a sensation of being oneself (thought’sprimal self-sensing), is indicative neither of disembodied rationalism nor thepathology of psychic retreats.There is in fact a genuine debate to be had here with Descartes’ rational-

ism. In the context of psychoanalytic ethics, for instance, Cottingham(1998) challenges the conventional view of Descartes’ incorporeal thinkingself. An engagement with what Cottingham has to say about the irreduciblecontingency of our human existence and the relative inaccessibility of mindto reflection (consciousness) in Descartes, would only add to the credibilityof the so-called ‘post-Cartesian perspective’ in psychoanalysis. Alternatively,Michel Henry (1985) presents an outstanding and persuasive ‘genealogy’ ofpsychoanalysis in which the Freudian ‘unconscious’ is seen as yet one moremisreading of the Cartesian Cogito. And, so long as the aim is to grasptrauma and world in conjunction with affectivity, Henry’s critique of psy-choanalysis as the ‘belated heir’ to representational metaphysics remainsindispensable. The challenge to think the Cogito beyond representation andthe finitude of its ek-stasis, a challenge aimed directly at Heidegger as wellas Freud and Lacan, calls into question the very terms of Stolorow’s thesis.Moreover, if one were to take the argument to poetry, in Der cartesischeTaucher Gr€unbein (2008) depicts the imagination of the modern CartesianLogos replete with a dynamic, intersubjective theory of the passions.However, staying with the epigraphs, and already on the way to what is

most personal in the book, the implications of the second epigraph are noless contentious from the perspective of classical psychoanalysis. Again,although Stolorow does not actually mention Freud’s Mourning and melan-cholia (1917 [1915]), his revised version of ‘the work of mourning’ drama-tizes the argument of phenomenological contexualism. The epigraph istaken from the first chapter of a book-length essay by Derrida, Politiquesde l’amiti�e, based on a seminar course he conducted in 1988–89: “Phil�ıabegins with the possibility of survival. Surviving – that is the other name ofa mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited”. The philosophic–autobiographical context of this statement becomes clearer when Stolorowtells us that he recently “encountered unexpected support” (p. 68) for hisdescription of loss in a series of works by Derrida. The works include notonly Politiques de l’amiti�e, but also the Wellek Library Lectures at the Uni-versity of California from 1986, Memories for Paul de Man, and a miscel-lany of memorial essays, funeral orations, and letters of condolencepublished in 2001 under the title The Work of Mourning.Stolorow finds Derrida speaking of the dead while at the same time link-

ing the figure of the friend to figures of grief. Foremost among the latterAntigone once again weights a plaintive tone, if not an entire world of feel-ing that traverses the trauma of loss from mourning to grievance. Here,Stolorow homes in decisively on the idea that phil�ıa lives, it becomes psy-chic, in the form of survival. I think the idea that phil�ıa survives is Stolo-row’s main thesis, which he defends not in terms of the anticipatoryresoluteness [Entschlossenheit] towards one’s own death so much as theanguished apprehension of mourning in the face of loss. To be clear, Stolo-row would dispute my distinction on the grounds that loss is “a form of

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existential death” (p. 69). But I do not see how this argument can bederived from Heidegger. Rather, it seems to me that Stolorow attempts toread Derrida against Heidegger so that he (Stolorow) might speak of “mysoul brother” (p. 65) or “my brother-in-darkness” (p. 66). The ‘brother’ isGeorge Atwood, “whose own world had been shattered by loss when hewas a boy [Atwood’s mother died when he was 8 years old]” (p. 66). The‘darkness’ is the ‘black sun’ of melancholia (to borrow Nerval’s metaphor),which is also the title of a chapter in Atwood’s contemporaneous publica-tion The Abyss of Madness.What are the therapeutic implications here? The analytic encounter does

not depend on the principle of fraternity. We would surely be right not totrust an analyst who says he is speaking to us as a ‘brother’, or as a ‘friend’,and would be well advised to make other arrangements. And yet, Stolorowstakes the therapeutic appropriation of Heidegger on a type of “emotionalkinship” (p. 78). Our “existential kinship-in-the-same darkness” (p. 65), ashe puts it, is essentially a matter of a call. The vocative (‘O my friends,there is no friend’) that opens Derrida’s account of ‘living-on’ as the condi-tion and the possibility of friendship, is rendered ‘out of the depths’(Ps. 130) in Stolorow’s phenomenology of traumatic loss.Who calls? And who is called? Presented in this way as a twofold ques-

tion, Heidegger identifies conscience [Gewissen] as the call of care: “The callcomes from me, and yet over me [Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch €ubermich]” (cf. Sein und Zeit, 1927, para. 57). Stolorow takes up and reworksthe twofold caller/called determination of self, together with the solicitousor concerned ‘being-with’ [Mitsein] with the others, as the dramatic focusand central argument of his book. Thus the attitude that motivates us “tocare about and for our brothers’ and sisters’ existential vulnerability” (p.78) brings us to the loss that animates not only this book, but also much ofwhat Stolorow has written over the past 20 years: the death of his wife. Hetells us here that when Daphne (‘Dede’) Socarides Stolorow died “my worldcollapsed” (p. 44); that her loss “shattered my world”; and that “possibili-ties that were central to my existence were annihilated” (p. 70). Following“the tragedy of Dede’s death” (p. 59), and seemingly in accord with thegrieved act of loving in Derrida’s account of mourning, Stolorow translatesbeing towards death into a “Being-toward-loss” (p. 44). In this case, thetherapeutic appropriation of Heidegger rests on the translation of loss intoan authentic mode of being towards death, the idea of loss as a traumaticexperience, or shattering episode, that reveals to us beings as a whole andthe nothing [das Nichts] that underlies them.The drama unfolds throughout the course of the book in the form of

dreams; disturbing and disturbed recollections of the scene of dying; and,what Stolorow calls, a Grief Chronicle composed on the ninth anniversaryof his wife’s death. All of which is underpinned by a traumatic scene set outin the fourth chapter on anxiety and trauma, followed by a re-familiariza-tion of world as an account of psychic survival. The traumatic scene, whichwill already be familiar to anyone who has read Trauma and Human Exis-tence, takes place at a conference almost two years after Dede’s death.At the conference dinner, surrounded by “old and good friends and close



colleagues” (p. 43), Stolorow is overcome by a feeling of deadness, some-thing he experiences in stark and painful contrast to his perception of thosearound him who appear to be full of life. He recalls the “unbridgeable gap”that seemed to open up during this estranging episode between him and theothers, as if “we now lived in altogether different worlds” (p. 43). Grief andits traumatic repetition set him apart, according to this description, in aworld the centre and meaning of which no long hold together. Again, onhis own reckoning he was alienated from his friends and felt strange inhimself. The task now is one of re-familiarization, which Stolorow definesin terms of his “ongoing effort to conceptualize emotional trauma, a projectdear to my ownmost heart” (p. 50). Most importantly, knowing that hiswife valued “staying rooted in one’s own genuine painful emotional experi-ences” has enabled him to remain “resolutely devoted” to the project ofre-familiarization as “a way of affirming my connection with her and keep-ing it alive” (p. 50).What ‘it’ means may not be as obvious as it seems. Hence the uncanny

feel of Stolorow’s ‘project’. And in an attempt to convey something of thegenuine originality of his description of dissociative forms of bereavement,which clearly owes more to Heidegger than it does to Freud, I have rede-fined the Freudian Trauerarbeit as the re-familiarization of world. Stolo-row’s indebtedness to Heidegger, however, is far from straightforward. Heacknowledges the debt only on the implicit assumption that, regarding ourbeing together with one another in the world, Heidegger himself did not seethe potential of his thought fulfilled. Accordingly, the therapeutic appropri-ation of contextualism aims to ‘radicalize’ psychoanalysis, but also to reviseand augment Heidegger. This, at least, is how I understand the meaning ofthe “mutual enrichment” of psychoanalysis and philosophy underlined inthe final chapter. In particular, Stolorow likens his traumatized state at theconference dinner to Heidegger’s depiction of anxiety [Angst]. He sees theaffective state of emotional trauma as analogous to anxiety where the latteris understood as a basic mood by means of which we are raised beyondourselves into beings ‘as a whole’ [im Ganzen]. The trauma–anxiety analogythus underpins Stolorow’s phenomenology of loss with respect to the trau-matizing impact of mortality.The question here is whose death matters to us. In depicting the scene of

trauma as a feeling of homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] rather than anythingto do with sexuality, that is to say, as something more archaic than objectsof desire, Stolorow casts his vote against Freud. But it is not clear how farthe phenomenology of loss, as Stolorow describes it, is consistent with thesense of an ending in Heidegger. It appears to me that the basic phenome-nological frame of reference shifts from anticipation [Vorgriff] and theunforgiving severity of the authentic to consolation and the fullness ofredemption; from coming to an end, understood as a potentiality of being,to being for the dead; in short, from dying to grieving. Heidegger describesa primordial sense of unhomeliness [Unheimishche], precisely to the extentthat our Dasein is finite, existing in the midst of finitude [Endlichkeit]. Bycontrast, Stolorow identifies our sense of reality primarily in terms of afamiliar home where loss (the death of the beloved) befalls the familiar and,



therefore, our sense of belonging to the world (“we now lived in altogetherdifferent worlds”); hence the ‘project’ of re-familiarization in the aftermathof traumatic loss.Again, although he would quarrel with the distinction, I think Stolorow

describes a subject who is bereft rather than angst ridden. And while He-idegger remains concerned with what is ontologically constituted prior toour consciousness of the world, it is hard to see how the therapeutic appro-priation of his thinking amounts to anything other than an exclusive preoc-cupation with psychological phenomena. Stolorow, however, attempts to“grasp the interplay” (p. 106) of ontological and psychological consider-ations via the notion of affect. Moreover, the shift from Angst to loss not-withstanding, finitude decides matters in Stolorow. The idea that phil�ıasurvives is linked to a relational conception of finitude. The main argumentis set out following an introductory chapter; a gloss on some key conceptsin Sein und Zeit; a brief summary of the history of contextualism in thework of Stolorow and his co-authors from the early 1970s onwards; and achapter on the phenomenology of traumatic temporality. Each of the fore-going supports the argument that the longing for emotional kinship is areaction to trauma, the meeting of which in contexts of attunement facili-tates integration and reparation. The aim is to extend the reach of Heideg-ger’s conception of solicitude so as “to encompass or entail the deep bondsof attunement and understanding that are essential to the integration of thetraumatizing impact of human finitude” (pp. 72–3). As such, the argumentstands or falls on the basic assumption that to care for [sorgen f€ur] someoneelse, to be concerned in this way with “the finitude of those we love” (p.108), is a constitutive structure of human existence and, at the same time, away of going on being. We survive as we love, according to Stolorow, inthe context of “an affect-integrating relational home” (p. 50). This life thatwe are, in other words, is situated in an essentially hospitable world.Irrespective of the merits of this argument, it seems a far cry from the

non-relational, existential discriminations of authenticity in Sein und Zeit.Indeed, the ‘fateful destiny’ [schicksalhafte Geschick] of authentic Dasein,understood as an expression of the fatality of the nation, is the disturbing,chilling theme of the penultimate chapter. Written in collaboration with At-wood and Orange, the chapter considers Heidegger’s investment in Nazism.Due largely to my serious misgivings about psychobiography, I find this theleast satisfactory part of the book. While allowing for the basic phenomeno-logical premise that philosophy begins in the Lebenswelt; by “psychologi-cally contextualizing philosophical assumptions”, it seems to me one is indanger of reducing “philosophical ideas” to “psychological sources” (p.101). Nevertheless, for Stolorow and his colleagues psycho-biographicalstudies are integral to the self-reflexive project of post-Cartesian psycho-analysis and, here, they offer a contribution to the “psychobiography of He-idegger” (p. 80).The “reconstruction”, which touches briefly on Heidegger’s Catholicism

and his extramarital affair with Arendt as well as his membership of theParty and his pronouncements as Rector of Freiburg University, is basedon a supposed inner “struggle with the issue of authenticity” (p. 93) and the



feeling of belonging. I think the crucial question, concerning the relation-ship between Heidegger’s investment in Nazism and his philosophy, is mud-dled by the idea that in joining the Party and supporting Nazi ideologyHeidegger sought a solution to “an extended crisis of personal annihilation”(p. 98). What purpose does the inference of vulnerability serve in this case?Where do the speculations on “madness” (p. 98) get us? The question issurely one of political conduct and its relation to thought. The autocraticgesture in Heidegger’s thinking is apparent from the beginning. Our atten-tion, however, is drawn away from Heidegger’s political activities throughan interpretation of die Kehre as more or less symptomatic of mental break-down. Inevitably, perhaps, a preoccupation with ‘the Nazi mind’ distractsus from the politics of totalitarianism and its institutional materiality.Indeed, if there is a positive conclusion to draw from this chapter it is thatpolitical phenomena, including Heidegger’s lectures and seminars from 1933to 1939, require political and historical analyses.

Steven GroarkeRoehampton University, Department of Social Sciences,

Southlands College, 80 Roehampton Lane, London, SW15 5SL, UKE-mail: [email protected]

ReferencesCottingham J (1998). Philosophy and the good life: Reason and the passions in Greek, Cartesian andpsychoanalytic ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Freud S (1917 [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE 14, 237–60.Gr€unbein D (2008). Der cartesische Taucher. Drei Meditationen. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.Heidegger M (1927). Sein und Zeit. Niemeyer, T€ubingen.Henry M (1985). G�en�ealogie de la psychanalyse: Le commencement perdu. Paris: PressesUniversitaries de France.

Stolorow RD (2007). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical psychoanalytic, andphilosophical reflections. London and New York: Routledge.

Landscapes of the Dark: History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis

by Jonathan SklarKarnac Books, London, 2011; 184 pp; £22.99

The question of being narrows dramatically from Beckett to Thomas Bern-hard, in what amounts to a defining movement of 20th century Europeanliterature. Beckett’s trilogy ends, so to speak, as a vaudeville act overshad-owed by the interminable prevarication of nihilism. We go on while notknowing how and feeling we cannot. For Bernhard, however, the questionof our going on being leaves no room for Beckett’s vagrants and the tragi-comedy of their straddling, crooked trajectories. In Bernhard’s masterpiece,Korrektur, Roithamer digresses ad nauseam but does not quibble: “Thequestion has always been only, how can I go on at all, not in what respectand in what condition” (1975, p. 130). The work of the negative does notplumb the depths of absence and loss in Bernhard, but rather, closes around



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