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Robert Stolorow in seeking a philosophical grounding for his psychoanalytic approach has written two carefully argued analyses of aspects of Heidegger's Being and Time; I regret that limitations of space prevent me from doing justice to his interesting and complex arguments. The first, on investigative method, is an account of Heidegger's revision of the subject-object relationship, a major philosophical issue in the German tradition since Kant. The second, on the connection between Heidegger's concept of anxiety and the psychoanalytic notion of trauma, is about the importance of anxiety for breaking through the false, average-everydayness-based anticipation of death as an event vaguely in the future to the anticipation of death as a constant and present possibility, indeed as ‘man's own most possibility’ that which we must face and experience alone and which can generate authentic possibilities.
Stolorow presents Heidegger's methods as being, like Stolorow's psychoanalytic method, phenomenological, hermeneutical, and contextual. It is worth mentioning that Heidegger saw himself revisioning the subject-object relationship in Being and Time. Heidegger said that, fundamentally, we are Dasein, which means ‘there-being’ or ‘to-be-there’. Stolorow's account of what Heidegger means by this is, ‘The word Dasein can serve two distinct linguistic functions simultaneously. In one, in the usual sense of linguistic reference, Dasein refers to us human beings as the beings to be interrogated as to our Being. In the other, Dasein, with its demonstrative, ‘da’ (there)m—which does not refer to anything except in particular contexts of use—serves as a ‘formal indicator’. In this second function, Dasein does not refer to or stand for anything; rather, it directs or points the reader in a non-referential way towards what is to be illuminated—the situatedness (‘da’) or contextuality of our Being’ (p. 5). Heidegger characterizes us as the Beings who are interested in Being, something tha