The power of phenomenology: Psychoanalytic and philosophical perspectives

The power of phenomenology (2019) is the 10th book co-authored by Robert Stolorow and George Atwood. This reviewer, after reading their 10th book, looked for reviews of their first book, Faces in a cloud (1979), and found a prescient review in 1980 by Judith Hubback (1917–2006). Hubback believed that Stolorow and Atwood’s writing style was too verbose. She observed their strong inclination towards iconoclasm, calling Faces in a cloud “a very sober version of The emperor’s new clothes … the iconoclastic remarks of the ‘enfant terrible’” (Hubback, 1980, p. 296). She called attention to the authors’ desire to “purify theory completely of reifications” (p. 298; emphasis in the original). She found the last chapter both considerable and impressive. In conclusion, Hubback hypothesized that the usual advantage of co-authorship was that the authors would restrain each other’s conceits; she wondered whether the opposite might be true here.

These observations continue to hold in the case of The power of phenomenology, starting with the work’s impressiveness: certainly in the amount of intellectual work behind it and in the personal honesty the authors show towards anonymous readers. The writing remains verbose, but judging by Stolorow and Atwood’s publication record, it is not something their students find troublesome. For a flavor, in one of the sections attributed to Stolorow, he writes:

Analyzing the philosophical thinking in its individual subjective context seemed to be of assistance in clarifying the limits to generality of the philosophical ideas as foundational for a science of experience, and thus in pointing beyond the particular horizons of applicability. (p. 12)

In one of Atwood’s sections, he writes:

The reductive-atomistic view, enframing and explaining away language in terms of factors and processes operating independently of it, is actually itself a Wittgensteinian ‘picturing’ of language’s essence, and leads to a metaphysicalization from which there can be no recovery. (p. 96)

Stolorow and Atwood’s practice – the standard practice in psychoanalysis it seems – has been to write several articles and then publish them as a book. Thus behind the 10 books are innumerable articles. The power of phenomenology consists largely of eight articles published between 2015 and 2018. The additional material in the book is dialogue, often admirably personal, between the authors. Another feature of their writing is that they have what one might call “set pieces,” that is, sections of text that make important points which they insert as needed in different publications. One mild problem with The power of phenomenology is that some of these set pieces are repeated within the book, that is, in separate chapters.

This book, typical of the authors’ corpus, is highly conceptual, intellectual. Philosophical terms are explained only parenthetically. Chernus (2017), in her review of their ninth book (Atwood & Stolorow, 2014) noted an irony in the authors’ work. Their at-times “extremely abstract and intellectualized” (p. 168) writing seems to run counter to their criticisms of excessive metapsychology in other psychoanalytic authors. They are still keen to attack reification, although it turns out they now agree with Hubback: one cannot eliminate all reifications (p. 94).

From their personal experiences with extreme trauma – as well as their clinical work with extremely disordered, traumatized or psychotic patients – Stolorow and Atwood have arrived at an authentically existential outlook. Human life is “an endless recurrence of emotional trauma” (p. 76). As humans, we are always facing both “the finitude of our existence and the finitude of those we love” (p. 76). Therefore life consists in both “always dying already” and “always already grieving” (p. 83). In this register, Stolorow and Atwood are generous enough to present themselves as “two old men, broken by sickness, broken-hearted again and again by tragic losses” (p. 128).

This reader was struck by the vastly different tenor between descriptions of the authors’ clinical work and their work as psychoanalytic theorists. As clinicians, they draw on cultural themes of intimacy, suffering, and the possibility of redemption (cf. Goretti, 2001). Atwood has felt “crucified by patients’ accusations, which can be like nails driven into my flesh, and the bleeding can be severe” (p. 124). Stolorow concludes that “When we dwell with others’ unendurable pain, their shattered emotional worlds are enabled to shine with a kind of sacredness” (p. 63, p. 76).

As theorists, on the other hand, they evoke themes of isolation if not aggression. Although there is the deepest camaraderie between the two authors, they present themselves as pitted in opposition against their colleagues. They are rebels (p. 11), revolutionaries (p. 82), radicals (p. 65). Describing “the place in which we often find ourselves with so many colleagues in our field,” they say that there “our disagreements there are frequently absolute and there is no common ground that can be uncovered” (p. 68). Stolorow and Atwood attribute the breach to different worldviews. They themselves have escaped from a “trance” (p. 3). Their colleagues do not recognize their own “philosophical assumptions” (p. 68). For this reader, knowing the authors’ interest in philosophy, the cultural figure of Socrates seemed apt: the authors are gadflies, destined to be misunderstood, but proceeding without fear or regret. Dr. Atwood called on the cultural image of masculinity and aggression in the Western films: “our life work is kind of like the bounty hunter played by Clint Eastwood … ‘the man with no name.’ We are the nameless bounty hunters of contemporary psychoanalysis, wandering toward an uncertain future” (p. 130).