Richard Bernstein, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, has written an important philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of evil (Bernstein 2002), an inquiry that will be of great value to psychoanalysts as they confront the problem of evil both in their consulting rooms with their patients...

Below is a letter I received from Dr. Russell Carr, a military psychiatrist who has been treating soldiers and Marines suffering from combat-related emotional trauma. It speaks eloquently to the need of traumatized persons to have their emotional pain met with attunement and understanding. This is a need that is...

In my book, Trauma and Human Existence (Routledge, 2007), I offered an account of the essence of emotional trauma: In shattering the tranquilizing illusions of everyday life, trauma requires us to own up to what these illusions have been evading -- human finiteness (i.e., limitedness, vulnerability, mortality, etc.) In virtue...

Dear Senator Snowe,

We are writing to implore you to act swiftly and strongly in support of true health care reform for all Americans. This must include a strong public option to help bring down the cost of health care by offering an alternative to the monopolies held by private,...

Do you remember when Bush used the bogus threat of weapons of mass destruction and the specter of nuclear annihilation to take us into war with Iraq? Do you remember when the McCain campaign tried to garner support with their deplorable "tribute" to 9/11 at the Republican National Convention, forcing...

"You who are immaculate, you pure perceivers.... Behind a god's mask you hide from yourselves, in your 'purity.'" -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche is widely regarded as the originator of the philosophical stance known as "perspectivism," which claims that one's perceptions and judgments are never pure or immaculate, because they are...

In the course of her efforts to comprehend the atrocities wrought by totalitarianism in the 20th century, epitomized in the horrors of Auschwitz, philosopher Hannah Arendt provided a brilliant analysis of the essence of political ideology. Such "isms," said Arendt, claim to explain all historical happenings by deducing them from...

If we're not self-lying,
we're always already dying.
If we're not self-deceiving,
we're always already grieving.
The answer to the existential quiz?
"Good-bye is all there is."

One dark morning some 18 years ago, I awakened to find my late wife lying dead across our bed, four weeks after her cancer had been diagnosed. It was a sudden, devastating loss for me, a trauma that shattered my world and from which I have never completely recovered. Its...

In a series of earlier articles, I have discussed the concepts of "collective trauma"--the shattering of our shared illusions of grandiose invincibility--and "resurrective ideology"--the efforts to bring back to life the illusions that have been lost. I have also characterized the current economic collapse as a collective trauma, both in...

The revelation of methods of torture used against prisoners at Guantanamo not convicted of criminal acts, and the question of whether the authorization of such methods by the Bush administration constitutes war crimes, remind us of the relevance of philosophical inquiry into the nature of evil that followed upon the...

When a society has been subjected to collective trauma, as Americans have been by the attack of 9/11 and the current economic crisis, its members tend to fall under the spell of one or another form of what I call "resurrective ideology"--shared beliefs that seek to restore illusions shattered by...

Two interweaving themes crystallized in the course of my investigations of emotional trauma (RD Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, Routledge, 2007). One pertains to trauma's context-embeddedness: Painful emotional experiences become enduringly traumatic in the absence of relationships in which they can be understood and held. The second pertains to the...

What do I mean by referring to our current economic crisis as a "collective trauma"? Let me explain.

I have characterized the essence of emotional trauma (RD Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, Routledge, 2007) as a shattering of what I call the absolutisms of everyday life--the illusory beliefs that...

In this radio interview I discuss my ideas about emotional trauma (RD Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, Routledge, 2007) and extend them to the state of the American psyche in what I consider to be an Age of Trauma. The current economic collapse, in addition to being a collective...

Extending my ideas about emotional trauma (RD Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, Routledge, 2007) to our current socio-political situation, I have characterized the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 as a devastating collective trauma that inflicted a rip in the fabric of the American psyche. In horrifyingly demonstrating that even...

In this radio interview I discuss my ideas about emotional trauma (RD Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, Routledge, 2007) and extend them to the collective trauma of 9/11 and the "portkeys" (a term borrowed from Harry Potter) that transport us back into that devastated state. Bush and now McCain and...

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. -William Butler Yeats

In my work over the last two decades attempting to grasp the nature of emotional trauma (RD Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, Routledge, 2007), I have concluded that its essence lies in the shattering of what I call the...