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35The tragic and the metaphysical in philosophy and psychoanalysis.The Psychoanalytic Review 100 (3): 405-421. 2013.This article elaborates a claim, first introduced by Wilhelm Dilthey, that metaphysics represents an illusory flight from the tragedy of human finitude. Metaphysics, of which psychoanalytic metapsychologies are a form, transforms the unbearable fragility and transience of all things human into an enduring, permanent, changeless reality, an illusory world of eternal truths. Three “clinical cases” illustrate this thesis in the work and lives of a philosopher and two psychoanalytic theorists: Fried…Read more
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32A Question of Time: Freud in the Light of Heidegger's Temporality (review)Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 61 (6): 1251-1256. 2013.In A Question of Time , Joel Pearl offers a new reading of the foundations of psychoanalytic thought, indicating the presence of an essential lacuna that has been integral to psychoanalysis since its inception. Pearl returns to the moment in which psychoanalysis was born, demonstrating how Freud had overlooked one of the most principal issues pertinent to his method: the question of time. The book shows that it is no coincidence that Freud had never methodically and thoroughly discussed time and…Read more
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32The Phenomenological Circle and the Unity of Life and ThoughtPsychoanalytic Review 103 (3): 291-316. 2016.This paper describes the important role of our deep immersions in philosophy in the development of our phenomenological-contextualist approach to psychoanalysis. Influenced most particularly by the phenomenological movement, our collaborative dialogue over more than four decades has led us to a shared commitment to reflection upon the philosophical underpinnings and constitutive contexts of origin of all our theoretical ideas. The growth of our thinking follows an endlessly recurring phenomenolo…Read more
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30Experiencing Selfhood Is Not "A Self"International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 11 183-187. 2016.Kohut’s lasting and most important contribution to psychoanalytic clinical theory was his recognition that the experiencing of selfhood is always constituted, both developmentally and in psychoanalytic treatment, in a context of emotional interrelatedness. The experiencing of selfhood, he realized, or of its collapse, is context-embedded through and through. The theoretical language of self psychology with its noun, “the self,” reifies the experiencing of selfhood and transforms it into a metaph…Read more
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29A book exploring the relationship between post-Cartesian philosophy and psychoanalysis.
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24Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis: My Personal, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical SojournThe Humanistic Psychologist 41 209-218. 2013.The dual aim of this article is to show both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy. Characterized as a phenomenological contextualism, post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds philosophical grounding in Heidegger’s ontological contextualism, condensed in his term for the human kind of Being, Being-in-the-world. Specifically, Heidegger provides philosophical support (a) for a theor…Read more
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21Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, is a revised and expanded second edition of a work first published in 1984, which was the first systematic presentation of the intersubjective viewpoint – what George Atwood and Robert Stolorow called psychoanalytic phenomenology – in psychoanalysis. This edition contains new chapters tracing the further development of their thinking over the ensuing decades and explores the personal origins of their most…Read more
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20A Phenomenological-Contextualist Perspective in PsychoanalysisIn Heather Macdonald David Goodman Brian Becker (ed.), Dialogues at the Edge of American Psychological Discourse, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 117-145. 2017.The author's phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective, characterized as a form of applied philosophy, investigates and illuminates worlds of emotional experience and the constitutive intersubjective contexts in which they take form.
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19Heidegger and Post-Cartesian PsychoanalysisIn Francois Raffoul & Eric S. Nelson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 451. 2013.The aim of this chapter is to show how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and vice versa.
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18The Felt Toxicity of PsychobiographyClio's Psyche. forthcoming.An exploration of shunning reactions to psychobiographical accounts of theoretical ideas, this article delves into the question of why this particular reaction is the most widespread, as well as the reactions one of the authors experienced to his own work on Heidegger.
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17Heidegger, Mood and the Lived BodyJanus Head 13 (2): 5-11. 2014.It is sometimes said that Heidegger neglected the ontological significance of the lived body until the Zollikon Seminars, where he elaborates on the bodily aspect of Being-in-the-world as a “bodying forth.” Against such a contention, in this article I argue that, because of the central role that Heidegger grants to mood as a primordial way of disclosing Being-in-the-world, and because it is impossible to think mood without also thinking the lived body, Heidegger has actually placed the latter at…Read more
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16Using HeideggerJournal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 64 (4). 2016.In an article in JAPA 64/3, Lawrence Friedman addresses a question he takes as his title: “Is There a Usable Heidegger for Psychoanalysts?” I am happy to report that this question has already been answered in my own work with a resounding “Yes”!
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12Blues and Emotional TraumaIn Fritz Allhoff, Jesse R. Steinberg & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Blues–Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011-12-09.This chapter contains sections titled: Emotional Trauma The Therapeutic Power of the Blues Three ‘Clinical’ Illustrations ‐ The Role of Lyrics Musical Characteristics of the Blues Concluding Remarks Notes.
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1Portkeys, resurrective ideology, and the phenomenology of collective trauma.In Lester Embree, M. Barber & T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology 2010, Vol. 5: Selected Essays From North America. Part 2: Phenomenology Beyond Philosophy, Zeta Books. 2010.In this essay, I extend my conception of emotional trauma as a shattering of the tranquilizing “absolutisms of everyday life” that shield us from our finitude and our existential vulnerability, to a consideration of collective trauma. Using the collective trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath as my prime example, I illustrate how traumatized people fall prey to “resurrective ideologies” that promise to restore the sheltering illusions that have been lost. I suggest that an alternative to these grandi…Read more
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1Trauma and human existence : the mutual enrichment of Heidegger's existential analytic and a psychoanalytic understanding of traumaIn Roger Frie & Donna M. Orange (eds.), Beyond Postmodernism: New Dimensions in Theory and Practice, Routledge. pp. 143-161. 2009.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 recogn…Read more
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Heidegger's Angst and Apocalyptic AnxietyMetalepsis 1 (1): 120-122. 2021.In this article I distinguish between the existential anxiety evoked by a confrontation with human finitude and what I call Apocalyptic anxiety signaling the end of human civilization itself. The end of civilization would terminate the historical process that gives meaning to individual existence. Apocalyptic anxiety announces the collapse of all meaningfulness, a possibility so horrifying that it commonly leads to evasion of its source.
University of California, Riverside
PhD, 2007
Areas of Specialization
Continental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Continental Philosophy |