Books by Robert D . Stolorow
How could the most important philosopher of the 20th century have thrown the weight of his though... more How could the most important philosopher of the 20th century have thrown the weight of his thought behind its most horrifying poli cal movement? That haun ng ques on represents a 'wounding of thinking' (in Blanchot's words), a trauma that philosophers are s ll painfully working through. When the most profound trauma theorist, Robert Stolorow, publishes his work on Heidegger, we should thus all pay a en on. As a psychoanalyst and philosopher, Stolorow shows how the phenomenology of trauma and Heidegger's thinking revealingly illuminate one another. Indeed, for all those wan ng to understand what the rela on between psychoanalysis and existen al philosophy will be in the future, there is no more important work than this deeply thought and clearly wri en medita on on the perils and promise of human finitude." -Iain Thomson"World, Affec vity, Trauma shows how today's psychoanalysis can be deepened and transformed by an encounter with Heidegger's thought -and vice versa. Rather than forcing a philosophical theory onto psychoanaly c prac ce, Robert D. Stolorow puts his careful readings of Heidegger into dialogue with clinical and personal experience, as well as using his own psychological insights to shed light on Heidegger the man. Stolorow makes the case that when we recognize, with Heidegger, that no one is a worldless, Cartesian mind, we can come to understand emo onal and rela onal problems in a contextual, intersubjec ve framework. This perspec ve focuses not on inner drives, but on affects as ways of par cipa ng in the world. As Stolorow argues, a Heideggerian understanding of phenomena such as anxiety, trauma, and mortality can help us develop a 'kinship-in-finitude,' an honest solidarity between vulnerable human beings."-Richard Stolorow's phenomenological contextualism illuminates worlds of emo onal experience as they take form within rela onal contexts. In so doing, he finds an important psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existen al philosophy in the phenomenology of emo onal trauma.
Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis
The Intersubjective Perspective
Psychoanalysis of Developmental Arrests: Theory and Treatment
Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology
Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory
Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach
Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice
Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life
Stolorow, R. D. (2022). Heidegger’s Nietzsche, th by Robert D . Stolorow
Psychology Today, 2012
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Robert D Stolorow Ph.D.
Feeling, Relating, Existing
Therapy
... more Verified by Psychology Today
Robert D Stolorow Ph.D.
Feeling, Relating, Existing
Therapy
Scientism in Psychotherapy
Show Me the Evidence!
Posted June 22, 2012
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These days, in this Insurance-Company-Driven Age of the Quick Fix, there is much talk in psychotherapy circles of “Evidence-Based Practice.” The application of this slogan has been remarkably devoid of philosophical questioning of the nature of psychotherapeutic practice or of the proper evidence for guiding the therapeutic approach to a suffering human soul.
My collaborators and I (Working-Intersubjectively-Contextualism-Psychoanalytic-Practice) have applied the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phronesis to the practice of psychoanalytic therapy. Techne or technical rationality is the kind of method and knowledge required for the uniform production of things. It is exemplified in the traditional, standardized rules of psychoanalytic technique, especially as these are claimed to apply for all patients, all analysts, all analytic couples, and all relational situations. We argue “that the whole conception of psychoanalysis as technique is wrongheaded … and needs to be rethought” (p. 21). We further suggest that what is needed to ground psychoanalytic practice is not techne but phronesis or practical wisdom. Unlike techne, phronesis is a form of practical understanding that is always oriented to the particular, to the uniqueness of the individual and his or her relational situation.
Traditional psychotherapy research tends to reduce human beings and human relationships to “variables” that can be measured, calculated, and correlated. Such procedures partake of what Heidegger calls the technological way of being or technological form of intelligibility. According to Heidegger, entities as a whole, including human beings, are intelligible in our technological era as meaningless resources to be calculated, stored, and optimized in the quest to conquer the earth. In my view, the technological way of being is also associated with the philosophical stance of scientism—the presupposition, exemplified in the scientific positivism characteristic of much research on change in psychotherapy, that the chief form of valid knowledge is that attained through experimental and quantitative methodology.
Such considerations point to the potential importance of qualitative, rather than quantitative, research. They also bring me back to a tradition in academic personality psychology—the tradition in which I was trained as a clinical psychology doctoral student at Harvard during the mid- and late 1960s—known as personology. This tradition, founded by Henry Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the 1930s, held as its basic premise the claim that knowledge of human personality can be advanced only by the systematic, in-depth study of the individual person. This emphasis on “idiographic,” rather than “nomothetic,” research was a radical departure from the philosophy of science that then dominated, and has continued to dominate, academic psychology in the United States.
I suggest that grasping the practice of psychotherapy as a form of phronesis rather than techne justifies a return to idiographic methods in studies of the psychotherapeutic relationship—methods that can investigate the unique emotional worlds of patient and psychotherapist and the specific intersubjective systems constituted by the interplay between them. It is only such idiographic research, I contend, that can illuminate the rich, complex, living relational nexus in which the psychotherapeutic process takes form.
International Journal of …, 2010
Page 1. Heidegger's Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., Georg... more Page 1. Heidegger's Nazism and the Hypostatization of Being Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., George E. Atwood, Ph.D., and Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D. Following the publication of Being and Time (1927), Heidegger's conception ...
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2010
Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more 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. e 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 metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.
Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more 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. e 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 metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2010
Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger's inte... more 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. e 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 metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it.
Psychoanalytic psychology, 2005
1. This article seeks philosophical and theoretical grounding for a clinical generalization, held... more 1. This article seeks philosophical and theoretical grounding for a clinical generalization, held by the author for more than 20 years, about the contextuality of emotional experience. Three characteristics of emotional experience are said to make its ...
Existential Analysis, 2018
This article examines the relationship between totalitarianism and the
metaphysical illusions on... more 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.
Psychoanalytic Review, 2012
Our original studies of the subjective origins of personality
theories in Faces in a Cloud (Atwoo... more Our original studies of the subjective origins of personality
theories in Faces in a Cloud (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993; Stolorow &
Atwood, 1979) put us on a lifelong path of rethinking psychoanalysis
phenomenologically, hence our early proposals for a
“psychoanalytic phenomenology.” Our unwavering dedication to
phenomenological inquiry, in turn, led us inexorably to the context-
embeddedness of all emotional experience—hence our contextualism.
Psychoanalytic review, 2012
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2021
In this article I offer some existential-phenomenological reflections on the interrelationships a... more 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.
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Books by Robert D . Stolorow
Stolorow, R. D. (2022). Heidegger’s Nietzsche, th by Robert D . Stolorow
Robert D Stolorow Ph.D.
Feeling, Relating, Existing
Therapy
Scientism in Psychotherapy
Show Me the Evidence!
Posted June 22, 2012
Share on FacebookShare
Share on TwitterTweet
Share via EmailEmail
These days, in this Insurance-Company-Driven Age of the Quick Fix, there is much talk in psychotherapy circles of “Evidence-Based Practice.” The application of this slogan has been remarkably devoid of philosophical questioning of the nature of psychotherapeutic practice or of the proper evidence for guiding the therapeutic approach to a suffering human soul.
My collaborators and I (Working-Intersubjectively-Contextualism-Psychoanalytic-Practice) have applied the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phronesis to the practice of psychoanalytic therapy. Techne or technical rationality is the kind of method and knowledge required for the uniform production of things. It is exemplified in the traditional, standardized rules of psychoanalytic technique, especially as these are claimed to apply for all patients, all analysts, all analytic couples, and all relational situations. We argue “that the whole conception of psychoanalysis as technique is wrongheaded … and needs to be rethought” (p. 21). We further suggest that what is needed to ground psychoanalytic practice is not techne but phronesis or practical wisdom. Unlike techne, phronesis is a form of practical understanding that is always oriented to the particular, to the uniqueness of the individual and his or her relational situation.
Traditional psychotherapy research tends to reduce human beings and human relationships to “variables” that can be measured, calculated, and correlated. Such procedures partake of what Heidegger calls the technological way of being or technological form of intelligibility. According to Heidegger, entities as a whole, including human beings, are intelligible in our technological era as meaningless resources to be calculated, stored, and optimized in the quest to conquer the earth. In my view, the technological way of being is also associated with the philosophical stance of scientism—the presupposition, exemplified in the scientific positivism characteristic of much research on change in psychotherapy, that the chief form of valid knowledge is that attained through experimental and quantitative methodology.
Such considerations point to the potential importance of qualitative, rather than quantitative, research. They also bring me back to a tradition in academic personality psychology—the tradition in which I was trained as a clinical psychology doctoral student at Harvard during the mid- and late 1960s—known as personology. This tradition, founded by Henry Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the 1930s, held as its basic premise the claim that knowledge of human personality can be advanced only by the systematic, in-depth study of the individual person. This emphasis on “idiographic,” rather than “nomothetic,” research was a radical departure from the philosophy of science that then dominated, and has continued to dominate, academic psychology in the United States.
I suggest that grasping the practice of psychotherapy as a form of phronesis rather than techne justifies a return to idiographic methods in studies of the psychotherapeutic relationship—methods that can investigate the unique emotional worlds of patient and psychotherapist and the specific intersubjective systems constituted by the interplay between them. It is only such idiographic research, I contend, that can illuminate the rich, complex, living relational nexus in which the psychotherapeutic process takes form.
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.
theories in Faces in a Cloud (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993; Stolorow &
Atwood, 1979) put us on a lifelong path of rethinking psychoanalysis
phenomenologically, hence our early proposals for a
“psychoanalytic phenomenology.” Our unwavering dedication to
phenomenological inquiry, in turn, led us inexorably to the context-
embeddedness of all emotional experience—hence our contextualism.