ABSTRACT
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is pseudo-scientific manual for diagnosing disordered Cartesian isolated minds. It completely overlooks the exquisite context-sensitivity and radical context-dependence of human emotional life and of all forms of emotional disturbance. Experiences of emotional trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned. In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching along collapses and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. Experiences of severe emotional trauma are the contexts, concealed by Ratcliffe's devotion to a decontextualizing psychiatric language, in which the existential feelings that he so beautifully elucidates take form. Trauma shatters the illusions of everyday life that evade and cover up the finitude, contingency, and embeddedness of our existence and the indefiniteness of its certain extinction. The counterpart of inauthenticity in the phenomenology of trauma is called dissociation, a defensive process discussed by most authors on trauma.
