Contextualizing is not nullifying: Reply to Mills (2005).

In omitting crucial words and sentencees, neglecting relevant citations, and overlooking important distinctions, Jon Mills' (see record 2005-04819-001) critique of relational psychoanalysis significantly misrepresents the authors' viewpoint. This viewpoint seeks to contextualize, but not to nullify, individual worlds of experience and their limiting horizons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Relevance of Early Lacan for Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism: Preliminary Communication.

In this article, the author attempts to show that Lacan's early writings are relevant to the author's own psychoanalytic perspective by virtue of Lacan's view of the psychoanalytic method and process as phenomenological, hermeneutic, and dialogic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correction to Stolorow (2006).

Reports an error in "Heidegger's investigative method in Being and Time" by Robert D. Stolorow (Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2006 Sum, Vol 23[3], 594-602). The sentence on p. 599 should read as follows: "Heidegger makes crystal clear that by Being-in he does not mean a categorial relationship in which one present-at-hand entity is spatially contained inside another present-at-hand entity." (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2006-09622-011.) This article explores Heidegger's investigative method--which the author sees as a unique blending of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and contextualism--and its relationship to its subject matter, the meaning of Being. The unity of Heidegger's investigative method and its subject matter is seen to mirror the contextual whole whose basic structure as Being-in-the-world his investigation unveils. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reply to Shill (2004).

Shill's (see record 2004-11107-008) claim that the intersubjective perspective does not address conflict and defense is glaringly mistaken. In his article on signal anxiety, Shill (2004) declared that "the intersubjectivist approach does not address issues of conflict and defense at all" (p. 119). Astoundingly, he seems to have made this absurd pronouncement without being aware of any of the numerous articles and chapters my collaborators and I have written on the subject of psychological conflict and defense over the past three decades, one of which was published in this very journal (Stolorow & Brandchaft, 1987). Our aim has never been to defocus emotional conflict but rather to contextualize it-that is, to locate it within constitutive intersubjective systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trauma in a presymbolic world.

This article explores the lifelong impact of an early trauma in shattering the sense of sensorimotor integrity. A clinical case is described in which severe trauma occurred in the presymbolic phase of childhood. In trying to grasp this case, a primal absolutism, taking form in early infancy through attuned holding and handling of the child's body and containment and modulation of painful affect states is hypothesized, characterized as a sense of sensorimotor integrity--a presymbolic sense of one's physical being as inviolable. The case demonstrates the lifelong impact of the early shattering of sensorimotor integrity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Final response to Strozier (2003b).

In responding to Strozier's (2003b) final reply, Stolorow corrects further mischaracterizations of his work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Psychoanalysis: Treatment of conflict or deficit?": Comment.

Contends that A. Sugarman (see PA Vol 82:33122) misstated Stolorow's (1987) viewpoint on the (false) dichotomies between the intrapsychic and interpersonal realms in psychoanalytic theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kohut and contextualism: Toward a post-Cartesian psychoanalytic theory.

This article portrays Heinz Kohut as a pivotal transitional figure in the development of a post-Cartesian, fully contextual psychoanalytic psychology. Despite his contextualization of narcissism and movement toward phenomenology and perspectivalism, remnants of Cartesian, isolated-mind thinking persisted in his metapsychology of the self and in his view of analytic empathy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The phenomenology of trauma and the absolutisms of everyday life: A personal journey.

This article chronicles a 6-year journey of understanding in which the author strove to comprehend the profound sense of estrangement and isolation that was a central feature of his own personal experience of psychological trauma. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Closing the gap between theory and practice with better psychoanalytic theory.

Proposes 2 criteria that the psychoanalytic theory must meet if it is to be relevant to psychoanalytic practice. First, therapy is concerned with the unfolding, illumination, and transformation of experience. The concepts of psychoanalytic theory, if they are to be useful in practice, must be experience-near (i.e., pertain to the organization of personal experience). Second, psychoanalytic constructs must be relational. Psychoanalytic inquiry entails the investigation of the analysand's experience of the analytic relationship (i.e., the transference). As such experience is codetermined by both participants in the dialog, the investigation must encompass the entire intersubjective field. The most important recent development in psychoanalysis is the growing recognition that intrapsychic experience must be understood in the context of the larger interactional systems in which it takes form. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)