Goodreads helps you follow your favorite authors. Be the first to learn about new releases!
Start by following Robert D. Stolorow.
Showing 1-4 of 4
“I regard longings for twinship or emotional kinship as being reactive to emotional trauma, with its accompanying feelings of singularity, estrangement, and solitude.”
―
―
“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.”
―
―
“In the region of trauma all duration collapses, past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition.”
―
―
“After hearing Atwood’s presentation, I began to think about the role such absolutisms unconsciously play in everyday life. 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, like delusions, whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naive 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 & 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. (The devastating impact of trauma on a small child, for whom the sustaining absolutisms of everyday life are just in the process of forming, is illustrated in Schwartz and Stolorow, 2001.)”
― Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections: 23
― Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections: 23
