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Let me first say that it is a gift to be challenged by and to challenge such articulate and astute thinkers as Robert Stolorow and Judith Teicholz. Engaging in this kind of dialogue makes my mind come alive, and little gives a discipline more life than to have some of its key concepts critically explored.
Bob Stolorow is right: I am not a clinician but a philosopher whose interests center on ethics and moral psychology. As such, my main concern is not how best to treat persons suffering from psychological traumas but to examine the key concepts that guide and structure our lives to see whether they might be unnecessarily constricting us or opening up new possibilities for enhanced aliveness. While Stolorow appropriately says that clinicians primarily need to attend to “disclaimed intentionality and the unlocking of unconscious meanings from a person’s experience,” humans also need theories about who we are and why we function the way we do. How we go about living our lives is profoundly affected not only by our psychosocial histories but also by the concepts with which we think about who we are and what life is all about. If we don’t think very much about life, then we are probably destined to have our lives structured by the regnant concepts of our society. As Socrates, Kierkegaard, and, more recently, Jonathan Lear (2017) have said, becoming human is no easy matter, for what it means to be human has a profound openness to it, as one can readily see from looking at the myriads of ways humans have chosen to occupy their humanity throughout history and across cultures.
Our economically based world has put forth a concept of how to be human that circulates around the notion of being an autonomous individual. The capitalist input into this concept commands us to attain economic self-sufficiency by becoming highly productive and rationally self-interested in our market exchanges. We are not to care about social values—such as community, family, the environment, et