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Two central, interweaving themes crystallized in the course of my recent work on trauma (Stolorow, 2007a). One pertained to the context-embeddedness of emotional life in general and of the experience of emotional trauma in particular. Emotional experience is inseparable from the contexts of attunement and malattunement in which it is felt. Painful emotional experiences become enduringly traumatic in the absence of an intersubjective context within which they can be held and integrated. The second theme, which drew on Heidegger's (1927) existential analytic, pertained to the recognition that emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence. In virtue of our finitude and the finitude of our important connections with others, the possibility of emotional trauma constantly impends and is ever-present. How could it be, I wondered, that emotional trauma is so profoundly context-dependent and, at the same time, that the possibility of emotional trauma is a fundamental constituent of our existential constitution? How could something be both exquisitely context-sensitive and given a priori? I found a pathway to a reconciliation of these two seemingly incompatible ideas in claims made by certain Heidegger commentators (Vogel, 1994; Critchley, 2002) about the essentially relational character of the experience of finitude.
Vogel (1994), in particular, pointed me toward the synthesis I was seeking. Just as finitude is fundamental to our existential constitution, so too, he claimed, is it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as “brothers and sisters in the same dark night” (p. 97), deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common finitude. Thus, although the possibility