8. The Phenomenology of Trauma and the Absolutism of Everyday Life:
A Personal Journey
Presenter: |
Robert D. Stolorow, PhD |
Chair: |
Philip A. Ringstrom, PhD, PsyD |
Self Psychology Page | 22nd Conference Program
Summary
This paper chronicles a six-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. Trauma shatters the sustaining absolutisms of everyday life, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the-world. Consequently, the experiential worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others. (This paper will be published in Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1999, Issue No. 3.)