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Over the course of his esteemed career, from his early work with George Atwood on the subjectivity of personality theories (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993), to the creation and development of his signature post-Cartesian, intersubjective perspective (Orange, Atwood, Stolorow, 1997; Stolorow & Atwood, 1992; Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987; Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2002), to his more recent examination of the phenomenology of trauma (Stolorow, 2007), psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow has enlightened us with his potent blend of theoretical clarity and sophistication and clinical sensitivity.
Stolorow is the co-creator with George Atwood of intersubjectivity theory, a lucid and compelling integration of phenomenological, hermeneutical, and contextualist perspectives. He has made a seminal contribution to psychoanalysis with his co-creation of a more fully relational psychoanalysis that views psychological phenomena and emotional life as arising developmentally and in the psychoanalytic situation always and inevitably in “constitutive relational or intersubjective contexts,” as he describes in this volume (Stolorow, 2011, p. 2). His abiding interest has been in cleaning up the theoretical misunderstandings that plague psychoanalysis, deconstructing conceptual shibboleths, and opening up pathways of healing to more recalcitrant forms of human suffering. The intersubjective perspective has not only been a sea-change in psychoanalytic understanding of human development and the process of therapy, but a profound resource in elucidating everything from our understanding of unconsciousness to the treatment of psychosis (Atwood, 2011).
In World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis, his most recent work, Stolorow presents a thoughtful and clarifying explication of Martin Heidegger, one of the seminal philosophers of the twentieth century, and a compelling meditation on the experience and healing of emotional trauma. World, Affectivity, Trauma explores, wi