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Illusion and its dismantling have been central from the very beginning of my efforts to grasp the phenomenology of emotional trauma. My studies of trauma were initially inspired by a traumatized state that I myself experienced. When the book Contexts of Being (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992) was first published, an initial batch of copies was sent “hot‑off‑the‑press” to the display table at a conference where I was a panelist. I picked up a copy and looked around excitedly for my late wife, Dede, who would be so pleased and happy to see it. She was nowhere to be found, having died some twenty months earlier. I had awakened the morning of February 23, 1991, to find her lying dead across our bed, four weeks after her metastatic cancer had been diagnosed. Spinning around to show her my book and finding her gone instantly transported me back to that devastating moment in which I woke up and found her dead and my world was shattered, and I was once again consumed with horror and sorrow.† I spent the remainder of that conference feeling like a strange and alien being.
Over the course of six years following that horrible occasion, I tried to understand the dreadful sense of estrangement and isolation that seemed to me to be inherent to the experience of emotional trauma. Eventually, I was able to grasp trauma as a shattering of what I then called the absolutisms of everyday life—the unquestioned set of beliefs that allow one to experience the world as stable, predictable, and safe (Stolorow, 1999). Dismantling of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a world that is unstable and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured.
In the years that followed, in concert with my immersion in the study of Continental philosophy, the concept of absolutisms of everyday life expanded to include all varieties of metaphysical illusion. Most influential were the works of Martin Heidegger (1927) and, especially, Wilhelm Di