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This book places affect—that is, subjective emotional experience (in contradistinction to drive)—at the center and as the framework of psychological life. This “entails a radical contextualization of virtually all aspects of human life” (p. 1) within a dynamic intersubjective field. Affect regulation makes possible one's ability to tolerate and experience one's feeling, and the process of emotional attunement is necessary for affect regulation to properly develop. When such attunement is absent, and “severe emotional pain finds no validating relational home in which it can be held” (p. 10), it becomes an unendurable, unintegratable state that constitutes emotional trauma. In this book Robert Stolorow draws on philosophical reflections, primarily those of Heidegger, to further elucidate the phenomenology of emotional trauma, lending it depth and richness, and contextualizing it in the ontology of the human condition.
The book proceeds simultaneously along three interwoven lines: the psychoanalytic, the autobiographical, and the philosophical. The first line, the psychoanalytic, charts a theory of intersubjectivity: the idea that from birth onward affect is regulated, or dysregulated, within ongoing relational systems. Thus, emotional attunement is crucial for a child's development of somatic-linguistic integration, which can be maintained or compromised at any time of life. The author then turns to the elucidation of an intersubjective theory of developmental trauma. This type of trauma occurs when there is a malattunement to painful affect, “a breakdown of the child-caregiver system of mutual regulation” (p. 3) that leads to unintegrated affective states and lifelong emotional conflict and vulnerability.
Following on his initial insights into the consequences of early relational trauma, Stolorow presents a more composite theory, one involving both mental agencies and dynamic functioning, that extends into the realm of clinical psychoanalysis. Repression is understood