Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series)

Trauma and Human Existence effectively interweaves two themes central to emotional trauma—the first of which pertains to the contextuality of emotional life in general, and of the experience of emotional trauma in particular, and the second of which pertains to the recognition that the possibility of emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence. The volume traces how both themes interconnect, largely as they crystallize in the author’s personal experience of traumatic loss. As discussed in the book’s final chapter, whether or not this constitutive possibility will be brought lastingly into the foreground of our experiential world depends on the relational contexts in which we live.

Taken as a whole, Trauma and Human Existence exhibits the unity of the deeply personal, the theoretical, and the philosophical in the understanding of emotional trauma and the place it occupies in human existence.