This began this with his first book Outside the Dream (1983) – and originally and free-associatively explored the vital impact of Lacanian thinking on contemporary psychoanalysis at that time (when Lacan was largely unknown in the English-speaking world).
He spent much of the 1970s training to be an analyst in Paris, and was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he attended classes and lectures by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, whose teaching variously resonates in the footnotes to the book.
In Paris, Stanton also became closely linked with the work of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, and, through him, became actively involved in seminal debates on the central role of afterwardsness in the unconscious psychological process of trauma.
In this context, Out of Order was clearly written to re-connect psychoanalytic clinical work to its founding revolutionary impetus in the residual unconscious, and help people gain the strength and insight to remain open to unpredictable and unforeseen change, and to challenge their world, rather than conform and adapt to increasingly confined norms.
Finally, there are the set interactive systemic structures of effect, generated by primary feeling/sensory introjections, that form initially around contundors, and then subsequently progressively elaborate after-effects around imagos.