Trauma and Illusion: A Conversation between Robert D. Stolorow and Peter N. Maduro

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reproduced below you will find the transcript of the interview I, Peter Maduro, conducted of Robert Stolorow, on April 17, 2021, respecting the forty-plus year history and conceptual development of his theory of emotional trauma. My interview of Dr. Stolorow was the centerpiece of an international on-line program co-sponsored by the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, in West Los Angeles, CA (ICP), and Psychoanalytic Inquiry (PI). (This program is available for viewing in its entirety upon request to ICP.) Around 1996, as soon as I began my clinical psychotherapy practice as a psych-intern here in West Los Angeles, CA, I joined one of Bob Stolorow’s clinical supervision groups. Toward the end of my first case presentation to Bob in that group he asked me what transference implications I saw in my patient’s trauma-soaked emotional experience. After a brief self-conscious hesitation, I replied, “What is transference?” Over the twenty-five-plus years since that first meeting with Bob, and that first encounter with the notion of trauma transferences, I have been steeped in Bob’s elucidation of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological-contextual inquiry, including notably his phenomenological-contextual inquiry into emotional trauma, and its literature. I have also been deeply affected by him as a person. Just during this time that I have known Bob, his psychoanalytic inquiries, including his distinctive illuminations in the phenomenology and contextuality of trauma that are the focus of my below interview, have borne the fruit of 5 books. 1 Each of these works is richly interdisciplinary at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. I hold myself quite privileged to have been at a place and time – namely, West Los Angeles from the mid-1990ʹs to the present – in which Bob’s progressive contributions to psychoanalytic understandings of trauma washed over me implicitly and explicitly as a person. They washed over me as a young boy who lost his father within a family system of denial, as Stolorow psychotherapy patient, as eager psychotherapist-in-development, as ICP psychoanalytic candidate and Stolorow supervisee, and as scholar of relational psychoanalysis, particularly of Bob’s and his collaborators’ intersubjective-systems framework. Additionally, over the last few years of the coronavirus pandemic, socio-political unrest, and climate change we have all been thrown more forcefully into seeing and feeling our own and our planet earth’s vulnerabilities. In this context, I have benefited personally, clinically, and as a citizen of our finite world from Bob’s trauma insights as he extended them from the traumatized individual to collective trauma. The interview proved remarkable in many ways. Among them, it was intellectually illuminating by virtue of Bob’s characteristically succinct, systematic articulation of his trauma thinking, and emotionally affecting by virtue of the vulnerable way Bob weaved his trauma concepts in with poignant clinical material and his own tragic losses.