Robert D. Stolorow describes his realization that Heidegger's existential philosophy provides invaluable philosophical tools for grounding a psychoanalytic phenomenological contextualism and for grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma. In particular, he cites Heidegger's analysis of anxiety and being-toward-death as containing crucial insights into the understanding of trauma. Stolorow's work at the boundaries of psychology and philosophy led to his ideas on the psychotherapeutic encounter as a form of applied philosophy and phenomenology. In a number of books and articles, he describes the therapeutic encounter as fluidly co-constituted by the experiential worlds of the patient and the therapist, with multiple dimensions of their experience oscillating between the background and foreground for each participant within the intersubjective field.