Review of Out There by Sarah Stark

Abstract

D eployed in Iraq in 2008, Navy psychiatrist Russell Carr searched the internet for psychoanalytic literature that would help him understand and reach the experiences of traumatized soldiers, and he came upon my book, Trauma and Human Existence (Stolorow, 2007). In an article that Carr (2011) subsequently wrote, he describes how his encounter with my ideas fundamentally transformed his approach to combat-related trauma: “In my remaining months in Iraq, I read Stolorow’s book repeatedly, carrying it with me as I traveled between forward operating bases and outposts” (p. 474). In addition to supplying him with guiding ideas, the book seemed to provide him with what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls a transitional object, a symbolic blanket of comfort, as Sarah Stark calls such objects in the novel under review. When Sarah Stark learned of my work on emotional trauma, she contacted me to see whether I might be interested in reviewing Out There, which she described as,