Trauma and Human Existence

Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections

Robert D. Stolorow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136873119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Trauma and Human Existence effectively interweaves two themes central to emotional trauma - the first pertains to the contextuality of emotional life in general, and of the experience of emotional trauma in particular, and the second pertains to the recognition that the possibility of emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence.

This volume traces how both themes interconnect, largely as they crystallize in the author's personal experience of traumatic loss. As discussed in the book's final chapter, 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.

Taken as a whole, Trauma and Human Existence exhibits the unity of the deeply personal, the theoretical, and the philosophical in the understanding of emotional trauma and the place it occupies in human existence.

1 The Contextuality of Emotional Life

DOI: 10.4324/9780203837801-1

A bare subject without a world never “is.”

Martin Heidegger

It is a central tenet of intersubjective-systems theory—the psycho-analytic perspective that my collaborators and I have been developing over the course of more than three decades (Stolorow, Atwood, & Ross, 1978; Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2002)—that a shift in psychoanalytic thinking from the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997) and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective fields (Stolorow, 1997). Unlike drives, which originate deep within the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind, affect—that is, subjective emotional experience—is something that from birth onward is regulated, or misregulated, within ongoing relational systems. Therefore, locating affect at its center automatically entails a radical contextualization of virtually all aspects of human psychological life.

Traditional Freudian theory is pervaded by the Cartesian “myth of the isolated mind” (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, chap. 1). Descartes’ philosophy bifurcated the subjective world into inner and outer regions, severed both mind from body and cognition from affect, reified and absolutized the resulting divisions, and pictured the mind as an objective entity that takes its place among other objects, a “thinking thing” that has an inside with contents and that looks out on an external world from which it is essentially estranged. Within philosophy, perhaps the most important challenge to the Cartesian subject–object split was mounted by Heidegger (1927). In striking contrast to Descartes’ detached, worldless subject, for Heidegger the being of human life was primordially embedded and engaged “in-the-world.” In Heidegger’s vision, human “being” is saturated with the world in which it dwells, just as the inhabited world is drenched in human meanings and purposes. In light of this fundamental contextualization, Heidegger’s consideration of affect is especially noteworthy.

Heidegger’s term for the existential ground of affectivity (feelings and moods) is Befindlichkeit, a characteristically cumbersome noun he invented to capture a basic dimension of human existence. Literally, the word might be translated as “how-one-finds-oneself-ness.” As Gendlin (1988) has pointed out, Heidegger’s word for affectivity denotes both how one feels and the situation within which one is feeling—a felt sense of oneself in a situation, prior to a Cartesian split between inside and outside. For Heidegger, Befindlichkeit—disclosive affectivity—is a mode of living, of being-in-the-world, profoundly embedded in constitutive context. Heidegger’s concept underscores the exquisite context dependence and context sensitivity of human emotional life.

My own systematic focus on affectivity began with an early article written with my late wife, Daphne Socarides Stolorow (Socarides & Stolorow, 1984/85), attempting to integrate our evolving intersubjective perspective with the framework of Kohutian self psychology. In our proposed expansion and refinement of Kohut’s (1971) “selfobject” concept, we suggested that “selfobject functions pertain fundamentally to the integration of affect” into the organization of self-experience and that the need for selfobject ties “pertains most centrally to the need for [attuned] responsiveness to affect states in all stages of the life cycle” (p. 105). Kohut’s discussions of the longing for mirroring, for example, were seen as pointing to the role of appreciative attunement in the integration of expansive affect states, whereas his descriptions of the idealizing yearning were seen as indicating the importance of attuned emotional holding and containment in the integration of painful reactive affect states. Emotional experience was grasped in this early article as being inseparable from the intersubjective contexts of attunement and malattunement in which it was felt.

Numerous studies in developmental psychology and even neurobiology have affirmed the central motivational importance of affective experience as it is constituted relationally within child–caregiver systems (see Lichtenberg, Beebe & Lachmann, 1994; Demos & Kaplan, 1986; 1989; Jones, 1995; Sander, 1985; Siegel, 1999; D. N. Stern, 1985). Grasping the motivational primacy of affectivity (Befindlichkeit) enables us to contextualize a wide range of psychological phenomena that have traditionally been the focus of psychoanalytic inquiry, including psychic conflict, trauma, transference and resistance, unconsciousness, and the therapeutic action of psychoanalytic interpretation.

In the early article on affects and selfobject functions (Socarides & Stolorow, 1984/85), we alluded to the nature of the intersubjective contexts in which psychological conflict takes form: “An absence of steady, attuned responsiveness to the child’s affect states leads to … significant derailments of optimal affect integration and to a propensity to dissociate or disavow affective reactions” (p. 106). Psychological conflict develops when central affect states of the child cannot be integrated because they evoke massive or consistent malattunement from caregivers (Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987, chap. 6). Such unintegrated affect states become the source of lifelong emotional conflict and vulnerability to traumatic states because they are experienced as threats both to the person’s established psychological organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties. Defenses against affect thus become necessary.

From this perspective, developmental trauma is viewed not as an instinctual flooding of an ill-equipped Cartesian container, but as an experience of unbearable affect. Furthermore, as I will elaborate and illustrate in the next chapter, the intolerability of affect states can be grasped only in terms of the relational systems in which they are felt (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, chap. 4). Developmental trauma originates within a formative intersubjective context whose central feature is malattunement to painful affect—a breakdown of the child–caregiver system of mutual regulation. This leads to the child’s loss of affect-integrating capacity and thereby to an unbearable, overwhelmed, disorganized state. Painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance, containment, and integration is profoundly absent.

One consequence of developmental trauma, relationally conceived, is that affect states take on enduring, crushing meanings. From recurring experiences of malattunement, the child acquires the unconscious conviction that unmet developmental yearnings and reactive painful feeling states are manifestations of a loathsome defect or of an inherent inner badness. A defensive self-ideal is often established, representing a self-image purified of the offending affect states that were perceived to be unwelcome or damaging to caregivers. Living up to this affectively purified ideal becomes a central requirement for maintaining harmonious ties to others and for upholding self-esteem. Thereafter, the emergence of prohibited affect is experienced as a failure to embody the required ideal—an exposure of the underlying essential defectiveness or badness—and is accompanied by feelings of isolation, shame, and self-loathing.

In the psychoanalytic situation, qualities or activities of the analyst that lend themselves to being interpreted according to such unconscious meanings of affect confirm the patient’s expectations in the transference that emerging feeling states will be met with disgust, disdain, disinterest, alarm, hostility, withdrawal, exploitation, and the like or that they will damage the analyst and destroy the therapeutic bond. Such transference expectations, unwittingly confirmed by the analyst, are a powerful source of resistance to the experience and articulation of affect. Intractable repetitive transferences and resistances can be grasped, from this perspective, as rigidly stable “attractor states” (Thelen & Smith, 1994) of the patient–analyst system. In these states the meanings of the analyst’s stance have become tightly coordinated with the patient’s grim expectations and fears, thereby exposing the patient repeatedly to threats of retraumatization. The focus on affect and its meanings contextualizes both transference and resistance.

A second consequence of developmental trauma is a severe constriction and narrowing of the horizons of emotional experiencing (Stolorow et al., 2002, chap. 3) so as to exclude whatever feels unacceptable, intolerable, or too dangerous in particular intersubjective contexts. My collaborators’ and my ideas about the horizons of experiencing have developed over the course of three decades from our attempts to delineate the intersubjective origins of differing forms of unconsciousness. This work is summarized in chapter 5. What I wish to emphasize here is that the focus on affect contextualizes the so-called repression barrier—the very boundary between conscious and unconscious. Befindlichkeit thus includes both feeling and the relational contexts in which it is or is not permitted to come into full being.

Like constricted and narrowed horizons of emotional experiencing, expanding horizons too can only be grasped in terms of the intersubjective contexts within which they take form. I close with some remarks about the therapeutic action of psychoanalytic interpretation.

There has been a long-standing debate in psychoanalysis over the role of cognitive insight versus affective attachment in the process of therapeutic change. The terms of this debate are directly descended from Descartes’ philosophical dualism, which sectioned human experience into cognitive and affective domains. Such artificial fracturing of human subjectivity is no longer tenable in a post-Cartesian philosophical world. Cognition and affect, thinking and feeling, and interpreting and relating are separable only in pathology, as can be seen in the case of Descartes himself—the profoundly isolated man who created a doctrine of the isolated mind (see Gaukroger, 1995; Stolorow et al., 2002, chap. 1), of disembodied, unembedded, decontextualized cogito.

The dichotomy between insight through interpretation and affective bonding with the analyst is revealed to be a false one once we recognize that the therapeutic impact of analytic interpretations lies not only in the insights they convey but also in the extent to which they demonstrate the analyst’s attunement to the patient’s affective life. I have long contended that a good (that is, mutative) interpretation is a relational process, a central constituent of which is the patient’s experience of having his or her feelings understood (Stolorow et al., 1978). Furthermore, it is the specific transference meaning of the experience of being understood that supplies its mutative power (1993) as the patient weaves that experience into the tapestry of developmental longings mobilized by the analytic engagement.

Interpretation does not stand apart from the emotional relationship between patient and analyst; it is an inseparable and, to my mind, crucial dimension of that relationship. In the language of intersubjective-systems theory, interpretive expansion of the patient’s capacity for reflective awareness of old, repetitive organizing principles occurs concomitantly with the affective impact and meanings of ongoing relational experiences with the analyst. Both are indissoluble components of a unitary therapeutic process that establishes the possibility of alternative principles for organizing experience whereby the patient’s emotional horizons can become widened, enriched, more flexible, and more complex. For this developmental process to be sustained, the analytic bond must be able to withstand the painful and frightening affect states that can accompany cycles of destabilization and reorganization. Clearly, a clinical focus on affective experience within the intersubjective field of an analysis contextualizes the process of therapeutic change in multiple ways.

2 The Contextuality of Emotional Trauma

DOI: 10.4324/9780203837801-2

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Contextuality of Emotional Life
• 2 The Contextuality of Emotional Trauma
• 3 The Phenomenology of Trauma and the Absolutisms of Everyday Life
• 4 Trauma and Temporality
• 5 Trauma and the “Ontological Unconscious”
• 6 Anxiety, Authenticity, and Trauma
• 7 Conclusions: Siblings in the Same Darkness
• Notes
• References
• Index