Review of Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections

Psychoanalytic Psychology 2010, Vol. 27, No. 2, 241–249 © 2010 American Psychological Association 0736-9735/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0019421 TRAUMA AND HUMAN EXISTENCE: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections by Robert Stolorow, New York, The Analytic Press, 2007, 62 pp., $19.95. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Reviewed by Philip A. Ringstrom, PhD, PsyD Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Robert Stolorow describes his book Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Reflections (2007) as a “project (that) has occupied (him) now for more than 16 years” (p. 45) starting six months after the tragic death to metastatic cancer of his 34-year-old wife Daphne (“Dede”) Stolorow, on February 23, 1991. His book exemplifies a value, deeply shared by the author and his late wife, that of “staying rooted in one’s own genuine painful emotional experiences” (p. 46). The volume is very dense (50 pages of text, total), the product of 16 years of intense and sensitive reflection. It condenses in very short order the history of his intersubjective perspective on developmental trauma, (the outcome of invalidating malattunement in the “parent– child mutual regulation system” lending to unbearable affect states in search of a “relational home”), his theory of the phenomenology of trauma (the shattering of “absolutisms of everyday life”), trauma’s temporality (trauma freeze frames the past and the future into an eternal present), and, finally an analysis of the ontological or universally constitutive aspect of trauma in our lives. This, he argues, following Heidegger (1927) is because we are always in a state of “Being-toward-Death.” Much of the last half of his book is based on Heidegger’s writings that are then woven into Stolorow’s theory of trauma. In this latter manner, Stolorow conflates what has been commonly referred to as Heidegger’s concept of “death anxiety” with his own conception of trauma, a controversial point to be addressed later in this review. All of the ideas Stolorow presents in this volume are autobiographically rooted in his examination of the traumatic and the enduring painful loss Dede’s death has played in his life. His volume is an exegesis on how he came to terms with this deeply personal loss from which he arrives at a theoretical formulation axiomatic of certain universal propositions about trauma. In positing these universal ontological givens, Stolorow somewhat befuddles his previous intersubjective system theory regarding the uniqueness of human reactions, a position grounded in an epistemological stance of “perspectival realism” (Stolorow, Orange, & Atwood, 2002). This conundrum is amplified by his lack of commentary on what at times seem like contradictions between his earlier epistemological position and the current universalisms emergent in his ontological one in his efforts at delineating an original theory of traumatology. Philip A. Ringstrom, PhD, PsyD, Senior Training Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Member of the International Council of Self Psychologists; Private Practice, Encino, California. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Philip A. Ringstrom, PhD, PsyD, 5004 Haskell Ave., Encino, CA 91436. E-mail: Ringsite@aol.com 241 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 242 BOOK REVIEWS Nevertheless, it is apparent that his traumatic reaction to Dede’s death created a personal crisis for him both personally, professionally, and theoretically. This crisis involved trying to figure out why his intersubjective systems theory of attuned responsiveness to his trauma (his clinical approach to developmental trauma) did not lead to his affect integration in the manner his earlier theory posited it should have. After all, in the throes of his traumatic loss, he specifies that he was met with a large community of willing and highly attuned friends, family members and colleagues eager to envelop him in many, many “relational homes,” though as becomes clear by his book’s end, there is really only one “relational home,” that of the “twinship” of “brothers and sisters in the same dark night” in which the emotional reactions of victims of trauma can be both held and understood. Still, not only were his fellows attuned responsiveness unable to provide the affect integration that his theory predicted it should; even worse, he writes, “they all seemed like strange and alien beings to me. Or more accurately, I seemed like a strange and alien being—not of this world” (pp. 13–14). Ultimately, his crisis led Stolorow to a rigorous investigation into what he describes as a “formulation (that) fails to distinguish between an attunement that cannot be supplied by others and an attunement that cannot be felt by the traumatized person because of the profound sense of singularity built into the experience of trauma itself” (p. 14). As already noted, the first part of his formulation, “an attunement that cannot be supplied by others” was readily accounted for in his developmental trauma model about the role malattunement has in such trauma, versus the role affect attunement has in facilitating integration of painful affect states during development, as well as, subsequently, in treatment. The second part, “an attunement that cannot be felt by the traumatized person” drove him to the philosophical investigation of the works of Heidegger, principally those found in Heidegger’s unfinished, though perhaps best known, treatise, Being and Time (1927). The remainder of this review takes issue with: 1) what is meant by trauma “shattering of absolutisms of everyday life”; 2) the conflation of Stolorow’s model of trauma with Heidegger’s ideas about death-anxiety; and 3) the “hidden moral agenda” of first, linking the awakening of authenticity to trauma, and second, instantiating the value of a “relational home” of “twinship” in an implicit us-versus-them division between those who have been traumatized (for whom the “twinship relational home” is their “only hope for being deeply understood” (p. 49) and the nontraumatized “normals.” In this division, the traumatized (at least some of them) are recognized as seeing through the veil of “absolutisms of everyday life” in a manner that lends to their living their lives more authentically, versus the “normals” who have not had this veil shattered and who therefore naively and defensively live their lives inauthentically so as to preserve their illusions of stability, predictability, and tranquility. In Chapter Three, Stolorow asserts that the impact of trauma shatters “absolutisms of everyday life.” A fundamental problem with this formulation is that absent a clear definition of “absolutisms”1 readers are left to any number of possible interpretations of 1 At the Annual Conference of the International Association of Self Psychologists in Toronto, Canada, in 1999, I (Ringstrom, 1999) discussed Stolorow’s paper “The Phenomenology of Trauma and the Absolutisms of Everyday Life.” At that time, I raised concern about the term “absolutism’s” lack of clarity, and that it might make his paper vulnerable to being misunderstood. Stolorow’s paper, which was published (Stolorow, 1999), later became chapter 3 of his book. All three iterations of the paper are exactly the same. BOOK REVIEWS 243 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. what this means.2 Instead of defining “absolutisms” Stolorow illustrates them. For example, he writes: “When a person says to a friend, ‘I’ll see you later’ or a parent says to a child at bedtime, ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ these are statements,” he argues, “that are like ‘delusions’.” Such “absolutisms,” he informs us, “are the basis of a kind of naı̈ve realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable” (p. 16). He writes “It is the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes the ‘unbearable embeddedness of being.’ (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 22) As a result, the traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness.” (p. 16) In effect, Stolorow is arguing that trauma bifurcates the experiential worlds of human beings into two categories, and, as his use of italics reflects, he is adamant: “It is not just that the traumatized ones and normals live in different worlds; it is that these discrepant worlds are felt to be essentially and ineradicably incommensurable” (p. 15). Now it is quite possible for this book to be read as pointing out the awakening that can come from a traumatic loss, especially as it shatters certain assumptions and expectations by which each of us adaptively lives. Everyday adages along these lines support this notion such as, the “smashing of one’s rose colored glasses.” The problem is that Stolorow is saying much more than this. He analogizes the “absolutisms of everyday life” by which he argues “normals” live, with his idea about “delusions,” which he writes: “are ideas whose validity is not open for discussion” (p. 15). This is somewhat confusing in relation to how he writes about “delusions” elsewhere in his impressive tome, for example: “An intersubjective analysis, . . ., focuses on how the patient’s so-called delusions protect and preserve a shattered world, how they reinstate a personal reality that has been substantially annihilated, how they embody an effort to resurrect a world-sustaining tie in the midst of an experience of complete obliteration.” (Stolorow et al., 2002) So there is an inconsistency here where the phenomenology of delusional process is analogized to that of “absolutisms of everyday life,” especially when Stolorow is arguing that “normals” defensively thrive on their delusions. But, as just cited above, “delusions” “protect and preserve (what is already) a shattered world.” So, on the one hand, he argues that “normals” have not yet had their “absolutisms of everyday life” shattered, hence they exist in an “incommensurable world view” from the traumatized. On the other hand, he argues that “normals” live in “delusions,” which protect them from what already has been shattered. So which is it? The answer is unclear. Either way, another shortcoming of Stolorow’s theory of trauma is that it ignores a large body of work in psychoanalysis on trauma, including for example what some 2 Stolorow is not the first psychoanalytic author to invoke the term “absolutism.” In fact, a review of the PEP Archives indicates the term shows up in 162 articles between 1918 and 2006. There is, however, little consistency in how it is used. Most frequently, it is referenced in relation to religion. Beyond this, the only other discernable pattern is that it is contrasted to “relativism”. In this vein, “absolute” as defined in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought is a “term (that) stands opposed to relative, and frequently means simply the negation of the relative, i.e. as that which is independent of relation” (Reese, 1980, p. 2). This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 244 BOOK REVIEWS traumatologists describe as the sequelae of what happens to those who have been traumatized including what sometimes occurs with respect to their processes of mentalization. For example, Fonagy, Gergeley, Jurist, and Target (2002) assert that the effects of trauma can present in “one or more of the following ways: (a) the persistence of a psychic equivalence mode of experiencing reality; (b) the propensity to continue to shift into a pretend mode (e.g., through dissociation), and (c) (the) partial inability to reflect on one’s own mental states and those of one’s objects” (p. 382). In addition, the authors argue that such patterns of mentalization, can result in rigidity in relationships involving the “petrification of systems of (self and other) representation” (p. 384). Fonagy et al.’s perspective, along with that of others such as Siegel, (1999) and Wallin (2007), strongly suggests that trauma may actually culminate in processes causing the formation of “absolutisms” rather than being a byproduct of shattered ones. Fonagy, et al., however, also write that, “Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy can break the vicious cycles by reinforcing reflective capacity” (p. 477) though this reflective process is not wedded to the necessity of a “twinship relational home.” There is a way to think about trauma that may relate somewhat with what Stolorow is positing and it pertains to what Vander Kolk (2007), Grotstein (1997, 2000), and elsewhere, I (Ringstrom, 1999) have written and that is that trauma involves the “assault of the unimaginable.” In this case, however, what is assaulted is not so much about “shattered absolutisms”; instead, that which is traumatic is the assault of what could not have been imagined. This involves the limitations of what we are able to imagine might happen to us, so as to, in effect, “create” an imagined version of “the real” so as not to be so assaulted by “it.” Here is a very brief example. In the late 1980s, my wife Marcia and I decided we were ready start a family. After many months of trying, we discovered Marcia was pregnant, only two weeks later to suffer the first of what became several years of a protracted period of infertility punctuated by three miscarriages. For many reasons, mostly pertaining to yet to be analyzed omnipotent fantasy, what happened was inconceivable to me (at least regarding the first miscarriage). It was the “assault of the unimaginable” from which I was extremely traumatized. While what occurred was also horrible for Marcia, it was imminently imaginable to her and therefore she was not traumatized. This experience and many others like it solidified for me an extremely important way of thinking about trauma (clearly among other formulations as well) and that is that it very much involves an assault on one’s state of our mind a priori to traumatic assault—and this may be composed of both shattered assumptions as well as an incapacity to imagine and therefore be prepared. Thinking this way, however, requires taking into account that trauma involves more than unbearable and unendurable emotional states in search of a “twinship relational home” as Stolorow defines it. It requires taking note of the context of one’s state of mind prior to a traumatic event and how it plays a role in not simply finding a relational home, but constructing one intersubjectively. Along these lines, Philipson (2010) argues: “This would seem to be a truism of contemporary psychoanalytic work and yet remains absent from Stolorow’s account. In his very open autobiographical description of his experience of trauma there is nothing about the unique meaning to him of his wife’s death, what he brought to this event, or why he was unable to feel the holding of his emotional pain that those around him offered.” Meanwhile, the trauma of “the assault of the unimaginable” has nothing to do with dividing the world into the enlightened, traumatized versus the naively defensive “nor- This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. BOOK REVIEWS 245 mals.” Indeed, the unique specificity of the “assault of the unimaginable” would seem much more in keeping with Stolorow’s main body of intersubjective writings which argues that all of our experiences are unique and idiosyncratic, as well as highly intersubjective. Thus, a bifurcated system of incommensurability between those who become enlightened posttrauma, and, the naı̈vely defensive “normals,” seems inconsistent with Stolorow’s earlier work. Setting these points aside momentarily, in this new volume, Stolorow now argues that it is our awareness of our mortality that is also constitutive of trauma. In other words, even if life has been gracious enough not to have shattered our “absolutisms of everyday life,” and even if our caregivers did a good enough job to not cause us too much developmental trauma through too much malattunement, there is still no escaping what Stolorow believes makes us constitutively vulnerable to trauma and that is our becoming aware of our mortality. But absent discussion of any alternative formulations, Stolorow appears to be arguing that coming to terms with this traumatic realization is the pathway to authenticity. To substantiate this position in his trauma theory, Stolorow turns to the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and in particular to what Heidegger describes as “Beingtoward-Death.” Stolorow’s interest in Heidegger certainly mirrors that of a number of authors both in psychoanalysis and in the humanisitic/existential movements in psychotherapy. In the mid 20th century, Medard Boss (1963) and Ludwig Binswanger (1963) were translating Heidegger’s ideas into the world of psychoanalysis. Their writings along with Heidegger’s were very influential to R. D. Laing (1960, 1969) and Jacques Lacan (1977). In contemporary psychoanalysis, Stephen Mitchell died before writing much about Heidegger, but was fascinated with him and Irwin Hoffman (1998) takes up Heidegger’s ideas (as well as many others) in exploring the vicissitudes of “death anxiety.” Meanwhile, in the humanistic/existential world of psychotherapy, Heidegger influenced Rollo May (1953), and Irwin Yalom (1980) and many others. Yalom, in fact wrote a 550-page book titled Existential Psychotherapy which is entirely about dealing with the vicissitudes of “death anxiety.” Much of what Stolorow takes up in Heidegger’s ideas about “death anxiety” is largely consistent with what all these other authors have said, with the exception that Stolorow is now introducing that recognition of our mortality is not simply anxiety inducing, but that in extremis, it is traumatizing. This vantage point underscores why “normals” cling to their “absolutisms of everyday life” including their denial of death. Nevertheless, while the pervasiveness of denial of death is a topic plumbed in great depth by Becker (1973), this does not necessarily mean that our awareness of our mortality is traumatizing, at least I don’t think so. Nor, for that matter, have I found any reference to trauma in any of the other aforementioned authors in their discussions about the vicissitudes of our awareness of our mortality. Still, to do justice to this critique, it’s important to briefly capture what Heidegger means by “death anxiety.” Heidegger posits that it is in our realization of our mortality (in Being-toward-Death) that we are forced to face an existential question about our ontogeny, that is, our unique existence. Until we reckon with this, it’s quite easy for us to lose ourselves in what he refers to as the “thrown condition” of our existence, which is constituted by the circumstances into which we are born. These include what he refers to as “historicity,” meaning our historical birthplace, as well as the “facticity” of our existence, that is, the facts pertaining to our gender, ethnic, racial and socioeconomic class distinctions, among other things. In these ways we lose ourselves into what Heidegger refers to as the position of “das Man” or the “they.” Heidegger notes that we subliminally sacrifice our ownmost authentic potentiality, every time we are absorbed in the idea of the 246 BOOK REVIEWS This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. “they” as in, for example, what “they’re saying, researching, wearing, doing, tasting, and so forth” Heidegger suggests the “They”— or what I might playfully describe as the “‘They’ Academy” or “‘They’ Inc.” or the “‘They’ Institute” or even the brand name “Them” —saturates our lives with ever present signifiers, strictures, and requirements of how we subliminally interpret how we are to participate in the “thrown condition of our existence.” And, it is up against this that our ownmost authentic self is challenged, versus living inauthentically in terms of the “they.” As Thompson (2000) writes: “From a Heideggerian perspective, . . . . The manner in which I exist is either authentic or inauthentic. I am inauthentic when I allow myself to be determined by others and what they expect me to be. In fact, this is the way we typically are except for those rare moments when we realize the degree to which we have compromised ourselves and hence lost ourselves in a socially constituted they-self.” (p. 44) Heidegger contrasts the uniqueness of our ownmost authentic self with the social roles many people assume as being part of the “they” (e.g., as in becoming a doctor, lawyer, teacher, business person, soldier—whatever informs one’s resume). However, all of these roles, Heidegger notes, are imminently replaceable. There will always be more doctors, lawyers, teachers, and so forth. But ontologically, in one’s unique iteration of Dasein (the condition translated as “being there”) there can only be one genuine you. And this point, it cannot be overemphasized, has completely imbued Western culture and thinking of the second half of the 20th century and carries over into the 21st. Psychological concepts such as “true self versus false self,” “real self versus social self,” “self and other,” and so forth, all owe some trace—at the very least—to their philosophical origins found in Heidegger’s ideas about ontology, as well as the enormous influence of other existential authors (e.g., Kierkegaard, Camus, Nietzsche, Sartre), and this is especially true wherever the question of authenticity emerges (Soloman, 2000). The concept of “death anxiety” is I believe one of the most important in our general psychological theory. As Hoffman (1998) points out, it inescapably gives life meaning, though most often in a paradoxical manner. He writes: “It follows from this paradox that death represents not only a danger, but also a kind of necessary boundary which gives us impetus to the assignment of value and meaning to experience . . . . One side (of the paradox) corresponds to the feeling that life derives meaning and value from the fact that it is destined to end, the other side to the feeling that life is rendered empty and meaningless by the anticipation of death.” (p. 49) Hoffman, like many of the aforementioned authors (including Stolorow) helps us see the potent meaning to our lives by which our awareness of death challenges us. In a similar vein, Heidegger argues that in this realization, we must become “resolute” in our choices if we are to live our lives authentically. But, once again, none of this, at least as I read it, necessarily constitutes trauma. Nevertheless, the arch of Stolorow’s theory arrives at a rather provocative assertion and that is that the “twinship selfobject function” that Kohut argues is a part of our in born universal developmental longings is incorrect. Instead, Stolorow argues that such longings arise from our reckoning with trauma and this includes the traumatic realization of our mortality. It is from this that we learn of what Stolorow refers to as longing for “kinship-in-finitude.” This is by no means a small difference from Kohut’s original “twinship” concept, as Stolorow’s argument that “twinship longings” are reactions born of This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. BOOK REVIEWS 247 trauma divides the world between those who “get it,” and those who “incommensurably” cannot. Two serious problems immediately surface in Stolorow’s formulation. At risk in his “kinship-in-finitude” concept is that if it is only “brothers and sisters in the same dark night” who can provide “the only hope for understanding of the traumatized,” his model paradoxically begins to constitute its own (Heideggerian) “they,” as nontraumatized “normals” are presumably experientially ill-equipped to relate, given their “incommensurable” world view. Second, this new “they”, as Philipson (2010) argues, exposes a potential class division involving an implicitly morally superior group, the “traumatized,” in relation to the naı̈ve, delusional “normals.” Worse yet, is the risk that the true-seers, the traumatized, now carry a “trump card” that upends the existential position of the naı̈ve, tranquilized “normals.” In its worst iteration, this may manifest in a kind of, “As I am traumatized, my lot is worse than yours, which entitles my position over yours.” Conjoint therapists recognize that there are many forms of competing selfobject longings/demands that may surface in couples therapy (Ringstrom, 1998) and that this has in the past decade been all the more heightened by current trends in “popularizing” the lexicon of traumatology. Too often, trauma can become an ennobling explanation for virtually all maladies of contemporary life. But when trauma is ennobled, we risk inadvertently creating the “politics of ‘victimhood’” in psychotherapy. This may manifest in what Jessica Benjamin (1992, 2004) refers to as the “split complementarity” of dominance and submission in intimately tied human relationships. Such patterns of dominance and submission, determine how meaning is constructed in the couple’s relationship (e.g., mentalization). Where this phenomena exhibits itself, meaning-making is ruled by the dominant traumatized party, who is fortified by the claim, “you’re not providing me with the requisite ‘relational home.’” Recall, that trauma is defined by Stolorow as involving “an intersubjective context in which severe emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which to be held” (pp. 9 –10). Thus, where real emotional differences arise in intimate interpersonal relations, an empowering claim can be made by the traumatized one that he or she is literally being retraumatized by the emotional position the other is taking—in particular because it is failing to submit to, that is, to “twin” with the traumatized one’s position. There is a way, however, in which this formulation can be seen as appealing. In a sense, becoming part of the privileged class may in some cases be an antidote to what is one of the most unendurable affects of trauma, and that is shame. (Bromberg, 1998, 2006; Grotstein, 1997, 2000) Shame is often so unbearable, so unendurable, that it must be dissociated. Nevertheless, it can lurk in retrospective experiences of one’s trauma, “Had I only known . . . , I could have prevented my father’s death . . . , my parent’s divorce . . . , my sister’s accident . . . my being molested or violated . . . ,” and so on. Shame is often the emotional sequelae of shattered omnipotence that can be found in the legacy of trauma victims from child development to later episodes of “assaults of the unimaginable.” Victims of trauma are frequently not only vigilant to being shamed by others, but are also vulnerable to their own shame states precisely because they can end up feeling responsible for theirs (and intimate other’s) trauma. (Bromberg, 1998, 2006; Davies, 1998, 2004; Grotstein, 1997, 2000) In this context, it is hard to imagine a better palliative (especially for dissociated shame) than to derive a sense of implicit visionary capacity by virtue of the authenticity that one’s traumatic experience/existence gives rise to over the unrealized and inauthentic “normals.” There is little doubt that patients suffering from developmental trauma may require lengthy immersions in treatment involving empathic resonance so as to bridge dissociated This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 248 BOOK REVIEWS self-states that are the sequelae of their development. Furthermore, there is little doubt that patients may also need a great deal of empathic recognition of their trauma, especially as it gives rise to their suffering from unbearable affect states that life may give rise to, including, if not especially the shame that is so frequently associated with trauma. Finally, while empathically attuned immersion to the vicissitudes of trauma might at least initially be augmented by “twinship” recognition—whether disclosed or not—the requirement of “twinship” in perpetuity as “the relational home” for those suffering from trauma raises some serious questions about the place of difference and alterity, at least in terms of how the topic of individuality and liberation is grappled with in much of the psychoanalytic canon, both traditional and contemporary. Ultimately, Stolorow’s formulation can be read as involving a kind of “hidden moral agenda” about the authentic life, who lives it, who doesn’t, and how they get there.3 Of course every psychoanalytic theory has its own variant of a “hidden moral agenda” (Rieff, 1959). Freud’s version of cure was clearly about the renunciation of our neurotic wishes in which he proffered: the cure in psychoanalysis results “in transforming (the patient’s) hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud, 1895, p. 305). Still, to do real justice to any of our theoretical formulations requires that we engage each other in a community of dialogical truth seeking, which necessitates taking up our differences. That is, to challenge one another’s theoretical assumptions including possible unintended consequences that authors simply may not anticipate on their own. To this end, it is useful to flesh out certain implications of Stolorow’s text, especially as it makes an original contribution to the fields of traumatology and psychoanalysis. Finally, notwithstanding, my considerable differences with this volume, this in no way impeaches my much larger admiration for much of Stolorow’s work. It remains, along with many other theories, a crucial cornerstone in my own clinical model building. 3 This point is underscored in a recent poem Stolorow (2009) published in the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. “If we’re not self-lying, we’re always already dying. If we’re not self-deceiving, we’re already grieving. The answer to the existential quiz? ‘Goodbye is all there is.’” References Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Benjamin, J. (1992). Recognition and destruction: An outline of intersubjectivity. In Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, Ed. by Skolnick, N. and Warshaw, S. 43– 60. Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: Recognition and the intersubjective third. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73, 5– 46. Binswanger, L. (1963). Being in the world and selected papers. New York: Basic Books. Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and daseinanalysis. New York: Basic Books. Bromberg, P. (1998). Standing in spaces: Essays on dissociation, trauma and clinical Process. Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press. Bromberg, P. (2006). Awakening the dreamer: Clinical journeys. Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press. Davies, J. (1998). Multiple perspectives on multiplicity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8, 195–206. Davies, J. (2004). Whose bad objects are these anyway?: Repetition and our elusive love affair with evil. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14, 711–732. Fonagy, P., Gergeley, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. New York: Other Press. Freud, S. (1895) Psychotherapy of hysteria. 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