9 (2008) Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18 113123 The Contextuality And

9 (2008) psychoanalytic dialogues, 18: 113-123. the contextuality and existentiality of emotional trauma robert d. stolorow, ph.d.

9
(2008) Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18: 113-123.
The Contextuality and Existentiality of Emotional Trauma
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.
In this article I chronicle the emergence of two interrelated themes
that crystallized in my investigations of emotional trauma during
the more than 16 years that followed my own experience of
traumatic loss. One pertains to the context-embeddedness of
emotional trauma and the other to the claim that the possibility
of emotional trauma is built into our existential constitution. I find
a reconciliation and synthesis of these two themes—trauma’s
contextuality and its existentiality—in the recognition of the bonds
of deep emotional attunement we can form with one another in
virtue of our common finitude.
Everybody’s changing, and I don’t feel the same. –Keane
I’ll be with you when the deal goes down. –Bob Dylan
During the more than 16 years since I had the experience of a
devastating traumatic loss, I have, in a series of articles
culminating in a book (Stolorow, 2007a), been attempting to grasp and
conceptualize the essence of emotional trauma. Two interweaving
central themes have crystallized in the course of this work. One
pertains to the context-embeddedness of emotional life in general and
of the experience of emotional trauma in particular. The other
pertains to the recognition that the possibility of emotional trauma
is built into the basic constitution of human existence. Here I
briefly explicate these two themes—trauma’s contextuality and it’s
existentiality—and seek a synthesis of them from a perspective that
can encompass them both.
It is a central tenet of intersubjective-systems theory—the
psychoanalytic framework that my collaborators and I have been
developing over the course of more than three decades (Stolorow,
Atwood, and Orange, 2002)—that a shift in psychoanalytic thinking from
the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves
psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism and a central
focus on dynamic intersubjective fields. 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.
This radical contextualization is nowhere more clearly seen than in
our understanding of emotional trauma. From an intersubjective-systems
perspective, developmental trauma is viewed not as an instinctual
flooding of an ill-equipped Cartesian container, but as an experience
of unbearable affect. Furthermore, the intolerability of affect states
can be grasped only in terms of the relational systems in which they
are felt. 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.
From the foregoing claim it follows that the intolerability of an
affect state cannot be explained solely, or even primarily, on the
basis of the quantity or intensity of the painful feelings evoked by
an injurious event. Trauma is constituted in an intersubjective
context in which severe emotional pain cannot find a relational home
in which it can be held. In such a context, painful affect states
become unendurable—that is, traumatic. It cannot be overemphasized
that injurious childhood experiences in and of themselves need not be
traumatic (or at least not lastingly so) or pathogenic, provided that
they occur within a responsive milieu. Pain is not pathology. It is
the absence of adequate attunement to the child’s painful emotional
reactions that renders them unendurable and thus a source of traumatic
states and psychopathology. Let my illustrate with a brief clinical
vignette (actually, a fictionalized composite).
A young woman who had been repeatedly sexually abused by her father
when she was a child began an analysis with a female
analyst-in-training whom I was supervising. Early in the treatment,
whenever the patient began to remember and describe the sexual abuse,
or to recount analogously invasive experiences in her current life,
she would display emotional reactions that consisted of two
distinctive parts, both of which seemed entirely bodily. One was a
trembling in her arms and upper torso, which sometimes escalated into
violent shaking. The other was an intense flushing of her face. On
these occasions, my supervisee was quite alarmed by her patient’s
shaking and was concerned to find some way to calm her.
I had a hunch that the shaking was a bodily manifestation of a
traumatized state and that the flushing was a somatic form of the
patient’s shame about exposing this state to her analyst, so I
suggested to my supervisee that she focus her inquiries on the
flushing rather than the shaking. As a result of this shift in focus,
the patient began to speak about how she believed her analyst viewed
her when she was trembling or shaking: Surely her analyst must be
regarding her with disdain, seeing her as a damaged mess of a human
being. As this belief was repeatedly disconfirmed by her analyst’s
responding with attunement and understanding rather than contempt,
both the flushing and the shaking diminished in intensity. The
traumatized states actually underwent a process of transformation from
being exclusively bodily states into ones in which the bodily
sensations came to be united with words. Instead of only shaking, the
patient began to speak about her terror of annihilating intrusion.
The one and only time the patient had attempted to speak to her mother
about the sexual abuse, her mother shamed her severely, declaring her
to be a wicked little girl for making up such lies about her father.
Thereafter, the patient did not tell any other human being about her
trauma until she revealed it to her analyst, and both the flushing of
her face and the restriction of her experience of terror to its
nameless bodily component were heir to her mother’s shaming. Only with
a shift in her perception of her analyst from one in which her analyst
was potentially or secretly shaming to one in which she was accepting
and understanding could the patient’s emotional experience of her
traumatized states shift from an exclusively bodily form to an
experience that could be felt and named as terror.
Clearly, the nature and form of the patient’s traumatized states were
a product both of the painful affect produced by her father’s sexual
abuse and of her mother’s intensely shaming response to the disclosure
of this emotional pain, and the patient expected similarly shaming
reactions from her analyst. Her mother’s shaming response and refusal
to provide a relational home for the patient’s painful emotional
states were central constituents of the intersubjective context in
which these states became dissociated and frozen into nameless bodily
symptoms. Only when her analyst became established as an attuned,
understanding presence could these symptoms begin to become
transformed into namable terror.
The foregoing vignette points to the central role of language in the
developmental transformation of somatic forms of painful affect.
Krystal (1974), one of the first psychoanalytic authors to examine
systematically the development of emotional experience, emphasized the
desomatization and verbalization of affect—the evolution of affect
states from their earliest form as exclusively somatic states into
emotional experiences that can be verbally articulated. Jones (1995)
refined our comprehension of this developmental progression by
emphasizing the importance of symbolic processes in its unfolding. The
capacity for symbolic thought comes online maturationally at the age
of 10-12 months, making language possible for the child. At that
point, the earlier, exclusively bodily forms of emotional experience
can begin to be articulated in symbols—for example, in words.
Consequently, the child’s emotional experiences increasingly can be
characterized as somatic-symbolic or somatic-linguistic integrations.
As Krystal (1974) and then, more extensively, Daphne Socarides and I
(Socarides and Stolorow, 1984/85) pointed out, this developmental
progression takes place within a relational medium, an intersubjective
context. It is the caregiver’s attuned responsiveness, we claimed,
phase-appropriately conveyed through words, that facilitates the
gradual integration of the child’s bodily emotional experience with
symbolic thought, leading to the crystallization of distinctive
emotions that can be named. In the absence of such verbally expressed
attunement or in the face of grossly malattuned responses, an aborting
of this developmental process can occur whereby emotional experience
remains inchoate, diffuse, and largely bodily.
I have claimed (Stolorow, 2007a) that it is in the process of
somatic-symbolic integration, the process through which emotional
experience comes into language, that the sense of being is born.
Linguisticality, somatic affectivity, and attuned relationality are
constitutive aspects of the integrative process through which the
sense of being takes form. The aborting of this process, the
disarticulation of emotional experience, brings a diminution or even
loss of the sense of being—what I have termed an ontological
unconsciousness—a hallmark of the experience of emotional trauma. The
loss and regaining of the sense of being, as reflected in experiences
of deadness and aliveness, are profoundly context sensitive and
context dependent, hinging on whether the intersubjective systems that
constitute one’s living prohibit or welcome the coming into language
of one’s emotional experiences. Consistent with Heidegger’s (1927)
claim that human existence is always embedded—a
“being-in-the-world”—one’s sense of being is inseparable from the
intersubjective contexts in which it is embedded and in which it is
sustained or negated.
I turn now from emotional trauma’s context-embeddedness to central
features of its phenomenology, as exhibited in a traumatized state
that I myself experienced at a conference in 1992, at which I relived
the terrible loss that had occurred 18 months earlier:
There was a dinner at that conference for all the panelists,
many of whom were my old and good friends and close
colleagues. Yet, as I looked around the ballroom, 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. The others seemed so vitalized, engaged with
one another in a lively manner. I, in contrast, felt deadened
and broken, a shell of the man I had once been. An
unbridgeable gulf seemed to open up, separating me forever
from my friends and colleagues. They could never even
begin to fathom my experience, I thought to myself, because
we now lived in altogether different worlds. (Stolorow, 2007a,
pp. 13-14)
The key that for me eventually unlocked the meaning of the dreadful
sense of alienation and estrangement inherent to the experience of
emotional trauma was what I came to call “the absolutisms of everyday
life” (Stolorow, 2007a, p. 16):
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 … whose validity is not open for discussion.
Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naïve realism and
optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced
as stable and predictable. It is in 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
and 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. It
is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are
fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the
deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and
solitude takes form. (Stolorow, 2007a, p. 16)
Another dimension of this felt incommensurability was brought to light
when I examined the disturbing impact of emotional trauma on our
experience of our temporality. Experiences of trauma become
freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever
trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned by
life’s slings and arrows. In the region of trauma all duration
collapses, past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other
than endless repetition. Because trauma so profoundly alters the
universal or shared structure of temporality, the traumatized person
quite literally lives in another kind of reality. Torn from the
communal fabric of being-in-time, trauma remains insulated from human
dialogue.
I found an additional and especially illuminating window into the
phenomenology of emotional trauma in Heidegger’s (1927) existential
interpretation of anxiety, which provides extraordinarily rich
understanding of states of anxiety at the traumatic extreme of the
anxiety spectrum and, in so doing, points the way to a recognition
that the possibility of emotional trauma is inherent to the basic
constitution of human existence.
Heidegger makes a sharp distinction between fear and anxiety. Whereas
that in the face of which one fears is a definite “entity
within-the-world” (p. 231), that in the face of which one is anxious
is “completely indefinite” (p. 231), ”is nothing and nowhere” (p.
231), and turns out to be “being-in-the-world as such” (p. 230). The
indefiniteness of anxiety “tells us that entities within-the-world are
not ‘relevant’ at all” (p. 231). Indeed, “the world has the character
of completely lacking significance” (p. 231).
Heidegger makes clear that it is the significance of the average
everyday world, the world as constituted by the public interpretedness
of the impersonal normative system he terms das Man (the “they,” the
“anyone”), whose collapse is disclosed in anxiety:
The “world” can offer nothing more, and neither can … others.
Anxiety thus takes away … the possibility of understanding
[oneself] … in terms of the “world” and the way things have been
publicly interpreted. (p. 232)
Insofar as the “utter insignificance” (p. 231) of the everyday world
is disclosed in anxiety, anxiety includes a feeling of uncanniness, in
the sense of “not-being-at-home” (p. 233). In anxiety, the experience
of “being-at-home” (p. 233) in one’s tranquilized “everyday
familiarity” (p. 233) with the publicly interpreted world collapses,
and “being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the ‘not-at-home’
… [i.e., of] ‘uncanniness’” (p. 233).
Note how closely Heidegger’s characterization of anxiety resembles my
own earlier description of my traumatized state at the conference
dinner. The significance of my everyday professional world had
collapsed into meaninglessness. The conference and my friends and
colleagues offered me nothing; I was “deadened” to them, estranged
from them. I felt uncanny—“like a strange and alien being—not of this
world.”
In Heidegger’s ontological account of anxiety, the central features of
its phenomenology—the collapse of everyday significance and the
resulting feeling of uncanniness—are claimed to be grounded in what he
calls authentic (i.e., nonevasively owned) being-toward-death.
Existentially, death is not simply an event that has not yet occurred
or that happens to others. Rather, according to Heidegger, it is a
distinctive possibility that is constitutive of our existence. As
such, death always already belongs to our existence as a central
constituent of our intelligibility to ourselves in our futurity and
finitude. It is “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence
at all” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 307), which, because it is both certain
and indefinite as to its “when,” always impends as a constant threat,
robbing us of the tranquilizing illusions that characterize our
absorption in the everyday world. Death as a constantly impending
possibility nullifies the tranquilizing absolutisms of everyday life
and thereby strips the everyday world of its significance for us.
The appearance of anxiety, for Heidegger, indicates that the
fundamental defensive purpose (“fleeing”) of absorption in the
everyday world of public interpretedness has failed, and that
authentic being-toward-death has broken through the evasions and
illusions that conceal it. Hence, we feel uncanny—no longer safely at
home in an everyday world that fails to evade the anxiety of authentic
being-toward-death.
I have contended (Stolorow, 2007a) that emotional trauma produces an
affective state whose features bear a close similarity to the central
elements in Heidegger’s existential interpretation of anxiety, and
that it accomplishes this by plunging the traumatized person into a
form of authentic being-toward-death. Trauma shatters the absolutisms
of everyday life that evade and cover up the finitude, contingency,
and embeddedness of our existence and the indefiniteness of its
certain extinction. Such shattering exposes what had been heretofore
concealed, thereby plunging the traumatized person, in Heidegger’s
terms, into a form of authentic being-toward-death and into the
anxiety—the loss of significance, the uncanniness—through which
authentic being-toward-death is disclosed.
The particular form of being-toward-death that crystallized in the
wake of my own experience of traumatic loss I would characterize as a
being-toward-loss. Loss of loved ones constantly impends for me as a
certain, indefinite, and ever present possibility, in terms of which I
now always understand myself and my world. In loss, as possibility,
all potentialities-for-being in relation to a loved one are nullified.
In that sense, being-toward-loss is also a being-toward-the-death of a
part of oneself—toward existential death, as it were. It seems likely
that the specific features that authentic being-toward-death assumes
will bear the imprint of the nature of the trauma that plunges one
into it.
The two themes that have crystallized in the course of my
investigations—trauma’s contextuality and its existentiality—have now
been clearly delineated. On the one hand, emotional experience is
inseparable from the contexts of attunement and malattunement in which
it is felt, and painful emotional experiences become enduringly
traumatic in the absence of an intersubjective context within which
they can be held and integrated. On the other hand, emotional trauma
is built into the basic constitution of human existence. In virtue of
our finitude and the finitude of our important connections with
others, the possibility of emotional trauma constantly impends and is
ever present. How can it be that emotional trauma is so profoundly
context dependent and, at the same time, that the possibility of
emotional trauma is a fundamental constituent of our existential
constitution? How can something be both exquisitely context sensitive
and given a priori? Here I seek a reconciliation and synthesis of
these two seemingly incompatible ideas that lie at the heart of my
investigations. I found a pathway to such a synthesis in an unexpected
source—certain critiques of Heidegger’s philosophy that followed upon
the exposure of the depth of his commitment to the Nazi movement
(Wolin, 1991).
A number of commentators perceive a certain impoverishment
characteristic of Heidegger’s conception of “being-with,” his term for
the existential structure that underpins the capacity for
relationality. Authentic being-with is largely restricted in
Heidegger’s philosophy to a form of “solicitude” that welcomes and
encourages the other’s individualized selfhood, by liberating the
other for his or her “ownmost” authentic possibilities. At first
glance,1 such an account of authentic relationality would not seem to
include the treasuring of a particular other, as would be disclosed in
the mood of love. Indeed, I cannot recall ever having encountered the
word love in the text of Being and Time. Authentic selfhood for
Heidegger seems, from this critical vantage point, to be found in the
non-relationality of death, not in the love of another. As
Lacoue-Labarthe (1990) puts his version of this claim:
“Being-with-one-another,” as the very index of finitude,
ultimately remains uninvestigated, except in partial relations
which do not include the great and indeed overarching
division of love and hatred. (p. 108)
Within such a limited view of relationality, traumatic loss could only
be a loss of the other’s selfhood-liberating function, not a loss of a
deeply treasured other.
Critchley’s (2002) critique is particularly valuable for my purposes
here, so I quote from it at some length. Specifically, he pointedly
“places in question what Heidegger sees as the non-relational
character of the experience of finitude” (p. 169). In a passage deeply
resonant with the experience of traumatic loss that lies at the core
of my investigations of emotional trauma, Critchley writes:
I would want to oppose [Heidegger’s claim about the
non-relationality of death] with the thought of the
fundamentally relational character of finitude, namely
that death is first and foremost experienced as a relation
to the death or dying of the other and others, in being-with
the dying in a caring way, and in grieving after they are
dead…. With all the terrible lucidity of grief, one watches
the person one loves—parent, partner or child—die and
become a lifeless material thing. That is, there is a thing—a
corpse—at the heart of the experience of finitude. This is
why I mourn…. [D]eath and finitude are fundamentally
relational, … constituted in a relation to a lifeless material
thing whom I love and this thing casts a long mournful
shadow across the self. (pp. 169-170)
Vogel (1994) moves closer yet to the synthesis I have been seeking, by
elaborating another dimension of the relationality of finitude. Just
as finitude is fundamental to our existential constitution, so too is
it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as “brothers
and sisters in the same dark night” (p. 97), deeply connected with one
another in virtue of our common finitude. Thus, although the
possibility of emotional trauma is ever-present, so too is the
possibility of forming bonds of deep emotional attunement within which
devastating emotional pain can be held, rendered more tolerable, and,
hopefully, eventually integrated. Our existential
kinship-in-the-same-darkness is the condition for the possibility both
of the profound contextuality of emotional trauma and of what my
soul-brother, George Atwood, calls “the incomparable power of human
understanding.” It is this kinship-in-finitude that thus provides the
existential basis of the synthesis for which I have been searching.
In his final formulation of his psychoanalytic psychology of the self,
Kohut (1984) proposes that the longing for experiences of “twinship”
is a prewired developmental need that in a proper milieu unfolds
maturationally according to a predetermined epigenetic design. In
contrast, I regard longings for twinship or emotional kinship as being
reactive to emotional trauma, with its accompanying feelings of
singularity, estrangement, and solitude. When I have been traumatized,
my only hope for being deeply understood is to form a connection with
a brother or sister who knows the same darkness. Twinship longings are
ubiquitous, I am contending, not because they are preprogrammed, but
because the possibility of emotional trauma is constitutive of our
existence and of our being-with one another in our common finitude.
REFERENCES
Critchley, S. (2002), Enigma variations: An interpretation of
Heidegger’s
Sein und Zeit. Ratio, 15:154-175.
Heidegger, M. (1927), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E.
Robinson.
New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Jones, J. M. (1995), Affects as Process: An Inquiry into the
Centrality of
Affect in Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Kohut, H. (1984), How Does Analysis Cure?, ed. A. Goldberg & P.
Stepansky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krystal, H. (1974), Genetic view of affects. In Integration and
Self-Healing:
Affect, Trauma, Alexithymia. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1988,
pp.
38-62.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1990), Heidegger, Art and Politics. Cambridge,
MA:
Basil Blackwell.
Socarides, D. D. & Stolorow, R. D. (1984/85), Affects and selfobjects.
The
Annual of Psychoanalysis, 12/13:105-119. Madison, CT: International
Universities Press.
Stolorow, R. D. (2007a), Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical,
Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: The Analytic
Press.
------ (2007b), Trauma and Human Existence: Implications for
Heidegger’s
Conception of Mitsein. Doctoral dissertation, Department of
Philosophy,
University of California at Riverside.
------ & Atwood, G. E. (1992), Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective
Foundations of Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
------ ------ & Orange, D. M. (2002), Worlds of Experience:
Interweaving
Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. New York:
Basic Books.
Vogel, L. (1994), The Fragile “We”: Ethical Implications of
Heidegger’s
Being and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Wolin, R., ed., (1991), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2444 Wilshire Blvd., #624
Santa Monica, CA 90403
[email protected]
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.
1 A closer look (Stolorow, 2007b) reveals that Heidegger’s conception
of authentic solicitude can be shown to entail a much richer account
of relationality.
9