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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 con text-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 its 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, & 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...