Now, however, I wish to add an existential qualifier to that last claim. Like its analogue, “secure attachment,†“trauma recovery†is an oxymoron—human finitude with its traumatizing impact is not an illness from which one can or should recover. A felt requirement to recover from, or become immune to, the circling back to emotional trauma can be a source of intense shame and self-loathing when, as is inevitably the case, it cannot be achieved. As I spelled out in my book, World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011; http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415893442/), “recovery†is a misnomer for the constitution of an expanded emotional world that coexists alongside the absence of the one that has been shattered by trauma. The expanded world and the absent shattered world may be more or less integrated or dissociated, depending on the degree to which the unbearable emotional pain evoked by the traumatic shattering has become integrated or remains dissociated defensively, which depends in turn on the extent to which such pain found a relational home in which it could be held. This is the essential fracturing at the heart of traumatic temporality and the dark foreboding that is its signature emotion.
Copyright Robert Stolorow
Tags:
circling back to trauma, context-embeddedness, dark foreboding, emotional trauma, emotional world, exanded world, existential significance, finitude, human understanding, integrating trauma, relational home, secure attachment, self-loathing, shame, shattered world, trauma recovery, traumatic fracturing, traumatic shattering, traumatic temporality
