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In recent years, Robert Stolorow (e.g., 2007, 2010, 2011) has richly cultivated the interplay between psychoanalysis, on one hand, and philosophical perspectives on the individual human being and his existential context, on the other. In particular, he has explored the conceptual links between features of intersubjective-systems theory, the name given to his and his collaborators' relational psychoanalytic framework, and Heidegger's (1927/1962) existential philosophy, or ontology, of human beings. In reviewing this literature, I will discuss five points of valuable interplay between Heidegger and the intersubjective-systems theory framework, and several corresponding attitudes that spring from them.
The first, and in many ways central, point of interplay is a substantive one grounded in the crucial role that both intersubjective-systems theory and Heidegger's existential philosophy ascribe to emotion—whether in the formation and contents of subjective worlds, as is the concern of psychoanalysis, or in being-in-the-world, as is the ontological concern of Heidegger's existential philosophy. In intersubjective-systems theory, it is lived affective and perceptual experience in the developmental system that gives form to a person's central emotional convictions, or organizing principles. This experience subsequently structures the horizons and the contents of the person's emotional world, perception of selfhood, otherhood, and worldhood, and what can and cannot be spoken of them.
In analogous fashion, Heidegger—as existential philosopher—grants a central role to affectivity in the human being's access to and experience of his being. Affectivity emerges as the primordial avenue through which being-in-the-world—that is, the human kind of being—is disclosed to itself. Elkholy (2008) claims that, for Heidegger, it is “[t]hrough mood [that] humans gain access to their world, to themselves and to their relations with others in the world” (p. 4). From within the Heideggerian fram