Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice endeavors to ground intersubjective psychoanalysis in a larger philosophical context, largely that found in the writings of Aristotle, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Bakhtin. This version of intersubjectivity theory has been articulated by Stolorow, Atwood, Brandshaft, and Orange in four earlier volumes. Intersubjectivity "views psychoanalysis as the dialogic attempt of two people together to understand one person's organization of emotional experience by making sense together of their intersubjectively configured experience" (p. 5). The authors conclude that if "we can identify the contexts that have led to a particular experiential organization, we can play with it, question it, and experiment with its reorganization" (p. 90). These authors, both in the current volume and in those that have preceded it, have expanded self psychology from a "one-person" to a relational perspective. The authors do not discuss, however, how their intersubjectivity theory differs from that of Benjamin (1995), another relational psychoanalyst.The authors are to be commended for the readability of the text and the absence of questionable metapsychology and jargon. Even the empirical psychologists they appear to eschew will find few concepts with which to find fault. Psychologists of any stripe will likely not disagree with the ideas of unconscious organizing principles or the threat of psychological annihilation. The authors also are to be applauded for using the term "co-transference" instead of "transference" and "countertransference,"
Dynamic systems theory is a source of powerful new metaphors for psychoanalysis. Phenomena such as conflict, transference, resistance, and the unconscious itself are grasped from this perspective as dynamically emergent properties of self-organizing, nonlinear, dyadic, intersubjective systems. The conception of development as evolving and dissolving attractor states of intersubjective systems richly illuminates the processes of pattern formation and change in psychoanalysis. Effective interpretations are seen as perturbations of the therapeutic system that permit new organizing principles to come into being.A new scientific paradigm has been evolving from the investigation of phenomena that have variously been called dynamic, nonlinear, self-organizing, or chaotic systems. With origins in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, this new perspective has been applied to the study of complex biological systems (von Bertalanffy, 1968;Waddington, 1977) and is being employed in the search for common principles underlying the behavior of such diverse phenomena as chemical reactions, clouds, forests, and developing embryos and children. Dynamic systems theory (Thelen & Smith, 1994) is centrally concerned with conceptualizing the process of developmental change-that is, the generation of "emergent order and complexity: how structure and patterns arise from the cooperation of many individual parts" (p. xiii). In accounting for the "messy, fluid, context-sensitive" (p. xvi) nature of the developmental process, this framework is exceptionally well suited to serve as a source of guiding metaphors for psychoanalysis.Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert D. Stolorow,
Adopting a post-Cartesian, intersubjective viewpoint that focuses on the interplay of worlds of experience leads to an opening up of the most severe ranges of psychopathology-the so-called psychoses-to psychoanalytic understanding and treatment. A Cartesian theory, inevitably preoccupied with the individual mind and its contact with a stable external reality, cannot encompass experiences of extreme self-loss and of the disintegration of the world. A sketch is offered of varieties of the experience of personal annihilation within an intersubjective, phenomenological framework of understanding. Features of the intersubjective fields typically associated with delusional states, manic episodes, and extreme trauma are discussed.
A critique is offered of four conceptions of neutrality that have been prominent in the psychoanalytic literature: neutrality as (1) abstinence, (2) anonymity, (3) equidistance, and (4) empathy. It is argued that once the psychoanalytic situation is recognized as an intersubjective system of reciprocal mutual influence, the concept of neutrality is revealed to be an illusion. Hence, interpretations are always suggestions, transference is always contaminated, and analysis are never objective. An alternative to neutrality is found in the investigatory stance of empathic-introspective inquiry. This mode of inquiry is sharply distinguished from the prescribing of self-expressive behavior on the part of analysis, and the distinction is illustrated with a clinical vignette.
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