Epistemological Responsibility and A Candle in the Darkness: A Review of Robert D. Stolorow's Trauma and Human Existence

In his preface to Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections, Robert D. Stolorow presents his work as an inquiry that interweaves “the conceptuality of emotional life in general and emotional trauma in particular,” focusing particularly on “the possibility that emotional trauma is built into the constitution of human existence” (p.xi). Stolorow’s inquiry is relevant not only to emotional trauma, but also advances our understanding of mental suffering and illnesses. Metatheoretical perspectives do not necessarily offer profound questions; they instead go straight to the heart of what may be called the “epistemological torment” in Western psychiatry. Initially, however, as I reflected on this book and on these questions, and the deep thinking they imply, my skepticism grew, since they were all to be handled in a very slim volume of a meager 62 pages. Further compounding my initial impression that this book did not delve into its subject matter in a sufficiently in-depth manner was the fact that Stolorow interweaves unwieldy theoretical considerations together with a deeply personal narrative. How can the personal become epistemologically relevant? My initial hunch, while dipping into the book, was that great questions usually accompany great ambitions, but on a first reading one could claim this book seemed to be all out of proportion. However, the author has carefully integrated theoretical and philosophical concerns, and his own experiences of traumatic loss demonstrating the point from Husserl –beyond subjectivity we can reach something common to all humankind. Stolorow is a psychoanalyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and has published extensively on the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and practice on the one hand, and philosophical questions on the other. He is well known for his works on the theoretical reformulation of orthodox psychoanalysis in books like Faces in a Cloud (1979), Structures of Subjectivity (1984), Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach (1987, with Brandchaft), and Context of Being (1992, with Atwood). Noting Stolorow’s track record, and being aware of his credentials in philosophy, including clinical psychology and in psychoanalysis, I suppressed my initial scepticism. I decided to give Stolorow’s work a chance. Trauma and Human Existence is Volume 23 in the “Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series,” and consists of seven fairly easy to read chapters. Each chapter, moreover, can function as a separate essay independent of its place in the book. The accessibility of the author’s writing is supported by his easy alternation between clinical and autobiographical vignettes, consistently guided as it is by theoretical and philosophical questions. However, this initial sense of readability is rather deceptive, because easy to read does not always mean easy to understand in-depth. I discovered that the intellectual challenge increases in Chapter 5, entitled Trauma and the “Ontological Unconscious,” where Stolorow opens with no less than five quotations from the philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ludwig Wittgenstein,