•  4
    Blues and Emotional Trauma
    with Benjamin A. Stolorow
    In Fritz Allhoff, Jesse R. Steinberg & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Blues–Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011.
    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.
  •  7
    Structures 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
  •  105
  •  266
    This essay develops the thesis that the essence of psychoanalysis lies in emotional phenomenology.
  •  15
    The Felt Toxicity of Psychobiography
    with George E. Atwood
    Clio'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.
  •  180
    After noting how academic philosophers have shunned psychobiography, the author brings to focus the psychobiographical sources of Martin Heidegger's "turn" from a hermeneutic phenomenology to a form of metaphysical mysticism.
  •  231
    Faces of Finitude: Death, Loss, and Trauma
    Psychoanalytic Inq 41. 2021.
    In this article I offer some existential-phenomenological reflections on the interrelationships among the forms of love, loss, finitude, and the human ways of being.
  •  11
    Heidegger, Mood and the Lived Body
    Janus 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
  • Heidegger's Angst and Apocalyptic Anxiety
    Metalepsis 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.
  •  236
    Bewitching oxymorons and illusions of harmony
    with Atwood George E.
    Language and Psychoanalysis 10 (1): 1-4. 2021.
    In the present essay we explore a form of linguistic witchery (Wittgenstein) aimed at forging a sense of unity from incompatible visions of reality—namely, the formation of oxymoronic hybrids.
  •  187
    The Historicity of the A Priori
    Human Studies 35 (1): 131-135. 2012.
    De Mul’s central thesis is that Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason can be understood as a radicalization of Kant’s recognition of the contingency and finitude of human reason.
  •  295
    Whence Heidegger’s Phenomenology?
    Human Studies 43 (2): 311-313. 2020.
    Scharff’s study of Heidegger’s earlier lectures and their debt to Dilthey’s phenomenology allow one to recognize the Diltheyan influences that pervade Being and Time, undistracted by Husserl’s super-Cartesianism.
  •  395
    Planet Earth: Crumbling Metaphysical Illusion
    American Imago 77 (1): 105-107. 2020.
    The author develops the claim that humans characteristically maintain a sense of protectedness by creating various forms of metaphysical illusion, replacing the tragic finitude and transience of human existence with a permanent and eternally changeless reality. One such illusion forms around planet earth itself, transformed into an indestructible metaphysical entity. It has become increasingly difficult, in the face of the ravages of climate change, to maintain the illusion of earth’s indestruct…Read more
  •  650
    Emotional Phenomenology and Relationality: Forever the Twain Shall Meet
    Psychoanalytic Inquiry 39 (2): 123-126. 2019.
    For more than four decades, George Atwood and I have been absorbed in rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. In the course of this work, I repeatedly made the claim that phenomenology led us inexorably to relationality, but until now I did not offer an explanation of this inexorability. In this article, I show that emotional phenomenology and relationality always already form an indissoluble unity, because relationality is constitutive of emotional experience.
  •  294
    This book demonstrates how the authors have experienced the power of phenomenology in their therapeutic work with patients, especially those struggling with horrific trauma; in their encounters with psychological and philosophical theories; and in their efforts to comprehend destructive ideologies and the collective traumas that give rise to them. The Power of Phenomenology presents the trajectory of this work. Each chapter begins with a contribution written by one or both authors, extending the…Read more
  •  258
    The as-structure provided by language, even in the sciences, is always constitutive of experience and never merely designative. “From Saying…it comes to pass that the World is made to appear” (Heidegger 1971 [1957]: 101).
  •  652
    Phenomenological Contextualism and the Finitude of Knowing
    The Humanistic Psychologist 46 (2): 204-210. 2018.
    When faced with the complexity of an intersubjective system, in which one is oneself implicated, an epistemic humility that recognizes and respects the finitude of knowing is essential.
  •  976
    The psychiatric diagnostic system, as exemplified by the DSM, is a pseudo-scientific framework for diagnosing sick Cartesian isolated minds. As such, it completely overlooks the exquisite context sensitivity and radical context dependence of human emotional life and of all forms of emotional disturbance. In Descartes’s vision, the mind is a “thinking thing,” ontologically decontextualized, fundamentally separated from its world. Heidegger’s existential phenomenology mended this Cartesian subject…Read more
  •  528
    Phenomenology and Metaphysical Realism
    Existential Analysis 29 45-48. 2018.
    This article examines the relationship between totalitarianism and the metaphysical illusions on which it rests. Phenomenological investigation is claimed to loosen the grip of totalitarian ideology by exposing its origins in the “resurrective” illusions that seek to overcome the impact of collective trauma. Phenomenology is thus shown to have emancipatory power.
  •  17
    A Phenomenological-Contextualist Perspective in Psychoanalysis
    In 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.
  •  34
    Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective – intersubjective-systems theory – is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, ca…Read more
  •  29
    A book exploring the relationship between post-Cartesian philosophy and psychoanalysis.
  •  15
    Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis
    In 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.
  •  39
    Psyches Therapeia: Therapeutic Dimensions in Heidegger and Wittgenstein
    with Robert Sanchez Jr
    Comparative 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
  •  47
    McMullin argues persuasively that individualized interpersonal encounters entail the mutual recognition of the particularity of each participant’s temporalizing way of Being-in-the-world.
  •  459
    The Phenomenology of Language and the Metaphysicalizing of the Real
    with George E. Atwood
    Language 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.
  •  21
    Death, Afterlife, and Doomsday Scenario (review)
    Psychology Today (NA). 2013.
  •  56
    Structures 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
  •  1
    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
  •  56
    Autobiographical 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.