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29A book exploring the relationship between post-Cartesian philosophy and psychoanalysis.
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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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42Psyches Therapeia: Therapeutic Dimensions in Heidegger and WittgensteinComparative and Continental Philosophy 5 (1): 67-80. 2013.This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices…Read more
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49McMullin argues persuasively that individualized interpersonal encounters entail the mutual recognition of the particularity of each participant’s temporalizing way of Being-in-the-world.
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476The Phenomenology of Language and the Metaphysicalizing of the RealLanguage and Psychoanalysis 6 (1): 04-09. 2017.This essay joins Wilhelm Dilthey’s conception of the metaphysical impulse as a flight from the tragedy of human finitude with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding of how language bewitches intelligence. We contend that there are features of the phenomenology of language that play a constitutive and pervasive role in the formation of metaphysical illusion.
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59Structures 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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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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59Autobiographical and theoretical reflections on the "ontological unconscious"Contemporary Psychoanalysis 42 (2): 233-241. 2006.In this article I draw on some personal experiences of my own as a springboard for a theoretical discussion of the contextuality of the several varieties of unconsciousness and, in particular, of a form of unconsciousness that I propose to call the ontological unconscious.
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93Heidegger, Mood, and the Lived Body: The Ontical and the OntologicalJanus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 13 (2): 5-11. 2014.Summary of claims: (1) One of the most important relationships between the ontical and the ontological in Heidegger’s thought is the central, ontologically revelatory role that he gives to moods. (2) Heidegger uses the word “mood” as a term of art to refer to the whole range of disclosive affectivity. (3) Because of the 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, Heidegge…Read more
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40A Phenomenological-Contextual, Existential, and Ethical Perspective on Emotional TraumaPsychoanalytic Review 102 (1): 123-138. 2015.After a brief overview of the author's phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective, the paper traces the evolution of the author’s conception of emotional trauma over the course of three decades, as it developed in concert with his efforts to grasp his own traumatized states and his studies of existential philosophy. The author illuminates two of trauma’s essential features: (1) its context-embeddedness—painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when it cannot find a context o…Read more
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114Heidegger’s Nietzsche, the Doctrine of Eternal Return, and the Phenomenology of Human FinitudeJournal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (1): 106-114. 2010.Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger’s interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. The author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche’s metaphysical position is seen as a metap…Read more
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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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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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44The Madness and Genius of Post-Cartesian Philosophy: A Distant MirrorPsychoanalytic Review 98 (3): 363-285. 2011.If the task of a post-Cartesian psychoanalysis is understood as one of exploring the patterns of emotional experience that organize subjective life, one can recognize that this task is pursued within a framework of delimiting assumptions concerning the ontology of the person. In this paper, we discuss these assumptions as they have emerged in the thinking of four major philosophers on whom we have drawn: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger. Our purpo…Read more
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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
University of California, Riverside
PhD, 2007
Areas of Specialization
Continental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Continental Philosophy |