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Martin Heidegger is considered by most non-analytic philosophers as one of if not the most influential thinker of the twentieth century. He is also recognized as one of the most controversial, enigmatic and difficult thinkers to understand. Robert Stolorow in the introduction informs us that “The aim of this book is to show how Heidegger's existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger's existential philosophy. It is thus intended as a contribution to both psychoanalysis and philosophy” (p. 1). Towards this end he has chosen to explicate the major themes appearing in Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time (1927). These include the following: Being, Dasein, anxiety, authenticity, Being-in-the-world, care, Being-towards-death and Temporality among others. Stolorow follows Heidegger in capitalizing certain words and explains Heidegger's use of hyphens “With hyphens unifying the expression being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), Heidegger indicates 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 ‘primordially and constantly’ always contextualize one another” (p. 14).
Heidegger denotes the human being by the term Dasein, the literal meaning of which is “to-be-there” or “there-being.” Heidegger's use of this term directs us to the fundamental situatedness or contextuality of our kind of Being. This situatedness is fleshed out in his account of Dasein's basic constitution as Being-in-the-world, a term whose hyphens indicate an indissoluble contextual whole. (p. 82)
The effort to grasp Heidegger's manner of writing, with its many arcane formulations and neologisms, and the realization that Heidegger's philosophy requires a working knowledge of such philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Husserl to name but a few, demands much from the reader.