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Robert Stolorow describes his book Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Reflections (2007) as a “project (that) has occupied (him) now for more than 16 years” (p. 45) starting six months after the tragic death to metastatic cancer of his 34-year-old wife Daphne (“Dede”) Stolorow, on February 23, 1991. His book exemplifies a value, deeply shared by the author and his late wife, that of “staying rooted in one's own genuine painful emotional experiences” (p. 46). The volume is very dense (50 pages of text, total), the product of 16 years of intense and sensitive reflection. It condenses in very short order the history of his intersubjective perspective on developmental trauma, (the outcome of invalidating malattunement in the “parent-child mutual regulation system” lending to unbearable affect states in search of a “relational home”), his theory of the phenomenology of trauma (the shattering of “absolutisms of everyday life”), trauma's temporality (trauma freeze frames the past and the future into an eternal present), and, finally an analysis of the ontological or universally constitutive aspect of trauma in our lives. This, he argues, following Heidegger (1927) is because we are always in a state of “Being-toward-Death.” Much of the last half of his book is based on Heidegger's writings that are then woven into Stolorow's theory of trauma. In this latter manner, Stolorow conflates what has been commonly referred to as Heidegger's concept of “death anxiety” with his own conception of trauma, a controversial point to be addressed later in this review.
All of the ideas Stolorow presents in this volume are autobiographically rooted in his examination of the traumatic and the enduring painful loss Dede's death has played in his life. His volume is an exegesis on how he came to terms with this deeply personal loss from which he arrives at a theoretical formulation axiomatic of certain universal propositions about trauma. In positing