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In his elegant 2007 work, Trauma and Human Existence, Robert Stolorow offers the reader keen insight into the “the unbearable embeddedness of being” (1992), including the impact of being alone with pain. Emphasizing the contextuality of human emotion and the concomitant primacy of affectivity, Stolorow defines trauma as unbearable affect without a relational home. The work, while theoretically dense, is remarkably lucid in its account of human emotional pain. Paradoxically, an understanding of this most basic of human experiences suggests a complex, multi-disciplinary formulation. The result is a brilliant blend of what the author has subtitled his autobiographical, psychoanalytic and philosophical reflections on “emotional trauma and the place it occupies in human existence” (p. xi).
Stolorow, an esteemed figure in the world of self psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis, has written extensively on intersubjective and relational perspectives. Although renowned for his scholarship, it is his profound human sensibility that defines the tone of this book. Through an inquiry into his own trauma, the particularity of which he both captures and transcends, Stolorow's painful struggle lays bare the horrific experience of alienation and isolation intrinsic to emotional trauma.
The author begins his text by telling us that trauma and human existence will be described through two interweaving themes—the contextuality of emotional trauma and its existential dimension:
One pertains to the contextuality of emotional life in general and of the experience of emotional trauma in particular. The other theme pertains to the recognition that the possibility of emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence. Whether or not this constitutive possibility will be brought lastingly into the foreground of our experiential world depends on the relational contexts in which we live. (p. xi)
The book, as a whole, takes the reader on a journey through which Stolorow d