Review of Out There by Sarah Stark

Deployed in Iraq in 2008, Navy psychiatrist Russell Carr searched the internet for psychoanalytic literature that would help him understand and reach the experiences of traumatized soldiers, and he came upon my book, Trauma and Human Existence (Stolorow, 2007). In an article that Carr (2011) subsequently wrote, he describes how his encounter with my ideas fundamentally transformed his approach to combat-related trauma: “In my remaining months in Iraq, I read Stolorow’s book repeatedly, carrying it with me as I traveled between forward operating bases and outposts” (p. 474). In addition to supplying him with guiding ideas, the book seemed to provide him with what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls a transitional object, a symbolic blanket of comfort, as Sarah Stark calls such objects in the novel under review.

When Sarah Stark learned of my work on emotional trauma, she contacted me to see whether I might be interested in reviewing Out There, which she described as,

the story of mostly Native Jefferson Long Soldier returning home to New Mexico after two tours of duty in Iraq. Believing that the novel he carried with him (One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) saved his life, Jefferson borrows his cousin’s motorcycle and rides to Mexico City to find the great writer. (personal communication, August 2014)

The remarkable parallel between Carr’s use of my book and Jefferson’s use of Marquez’s book, both in the context of combat-related trauma suffered in Iraq, intrigued me, so I accepted the assignment. I anticipated that Stark’s novel might contain rich and valuable descriptions of the experience of combat-related trauma, and I was not disappointed.

In my book I contend that the essence of emotional trauma lies in the shattering of what I call the absolutisms of everyday life:

When a person says to a friend, “I’ll see you later,” or a parent says to a child at bedtime, “I’ll see you in the morning,” these are statements, like delusions, whose validity