Trauma and the “Ontological Unconscious”

In this chapter I draw on some personal experiences as a spring-board for a theoretical discussion of the contextuality of the several varieties of unconsciousness and, in particular, of a form of unconsciousness that I propose to call the ontological unconscious. I begin with a poem about my youngest daughter entitled “Emily Running” (Stolorow, 2003), which I wrote in September of 2003. Because I was not in a traumatized state when I wrote it, the poem could exhibit the temporal unity of existence discussed in the previous chapter.