Robert D. Stolorow is among the foremost voices reimagining psychoanalysis for an age marked by trauma, alienation, and the collapse of stable meaning. Drawing deeply from existential phenomenology—especially Martin Heidegger—Stolorow’s work reframes not only the practice of therapy, but our very understanding of what it means to be human in a fragile, uncertain world.

Stolorow is famously known for working together in a kind of philosophical friendship with his colleague George Atwood, reworking the philosophical assumptions of psychoanalysis toward a version of therapy that is more coherent, attuned to each individual, and honest, in the individual's own experience and in the context of their experiential world.

I see his most profound achievement in bringing in the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger in his analysis of human finitude. For Heidegger, to be human is to be thrown into a world that is fundamentally contingent, shaped by history and circumstance, and marked always by an underlying anxiety—anxiety before our own groundlessness and unavoidable death. Heidegger’s celebrated phrase, “being-toward-death,” describes the human condition of living always in the shadow of mortality, a condition that undercuts the routines and platitudes of daily life.

For Stolorow, trauma is not merely an injury that disrupts........

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