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Until the 1970s psychoanalysis was a major cultural force in most Western countries, and in the US it was also a central player in the mental health establishment. It has largely lost its standing with the wider public and in academia, partially because contemporary global culture is enamored with quick-fix methods that promise quick relief, and partially because psychoanalysis has not done enough to communicate with the scientific mainstream and has tended to insulate itself from other theories and approaches.
One of the most fruitful paradigms for the understanding of human existence throughout the 20th century was existentialism. There were early attempts to connect psychoanalysis and existentialism (for example, by Ludwig Binswanger), but the connection has not succeeded in capturing the attention of the psychoanalytic mainstream.
Robert Stolorow's World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2011) is an important step in Stolorow's ongoing project of opening psychoanalysis to one of the most important approaches to human nature and existence: existential psychology and philosophy in its Heideggerian version. Stolorow's main objective is to show how integrating existential philosophy can enrich modern psychoanalysis, and to show this possibility through a phenomenology of traumatic experience.
Stolorow first introduces the psychoanalytic reader to basic categories of Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time (1927/2010). Heidegger's basic thesis is that humans live in a world structured by links of significance that guide our day-to-day lives: we stick to an unquestioned acceptance of our social identity, our connection to those close to us and to the rest of our social world. We mostly move in a set of clearly defined obligations and roles we take for granted.
Behind this, Heidegger argues, lurks the existential structure of human existence: we are finite beings, making choices all the time, living within the horizon of our knowle