World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis

Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective - intersubjective-systems theory - is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, can be enriched and expanded by an encounter with post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he creates an important psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existential philosophy in the phenomenology of emotional trauma.

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., is a Founding Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York. He is the author or coauthor of nine other books, the most recent of which is Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Routledge, 2007).