The Intersubjective Turn in Psychoanalysis: A Comparison of Contemporary Theorists: Part 1: Jessica Benjamin

Reply to Reviews by Slavin, Stein, and Stern

“…Perhaps many fail to notice that in chapter 8 of Ritual and Spontaneity, the gist of the section entitled "On Throwing Away the Book" is actually about the importance of not throwing it away! Recently, in the list of references of a paper that is quite sympathetic to my views (Gerhardt, Sweetnam, and Borton, 2000), the title of the essay that became chapter 8 ("Dialectical Thinking and Therapeutic Action in the Psychoanalytic Process") is changed to: "Dialectical Thinking and Therapeutic Action: On Throwing Away the Book," which is not only incorrect but, for me, painfully misleading. The fundamental asymmetry of personal selfexpression and exposure remains the core of the Book, the heart of psychoanalytic ritual, which should not be discarded even while the value of "deviations" in which the analyst's subjectivity moves to the foreground is fully recognized.…”

“…Because of the effort to provide such opportunities-probably common to most relational perspectives-it may well be the case that certain kinds of "reliving" of early childhood experiences of deprivation and nonrecognition will be sacrificed. In a recent article in this journal, mentioned earlier, the first of a three-part series on the "intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis," Gerhardt et al (2000) comment that, "according to Cooper and Levit (1998), one difference between British object relations and the American relational school is that the latter is quicker to invoke a new object experience-both in terms of its theoretical importance and its role in clinical practice-rather than hold the role of bad object, as Fairbairn's theory suggests" (p. 25). I believe that may be true.…”

The Dwelling Places of Self-Experience

“…When a person is predominantly experiencing the self from within one particular domain, the other three underlie to differing degrees the more pronounced locus. Using a spatial metaphor like dwelling place, site, locus, domain, or realm (which I treat as roughly synonymous)  1 This does not gainsay the importance of constructive studies that have emerged from a close examination of the intrapsychic versus interpersonal (or intersubjective) poles of internal experience-see for example Aron, 1996;Benjamin, 1995;Gerhardt, Sweetnam, and Borton, 2000;Mitchell, 1988;Ogden, 1994;Stolorow and Atwood, 1992. 2 I would like to distinguish this term from the methodological procedure known as phenomenology, which is a means of exploring an individual's subjective world by way of a particular focus on his or her experience of temporality, spatiality, and other qualities of life (May, Angel, and Ellenberger, 1958). 3 A fuller elaboration of the continuum would include a spiritual/mystical/ transcendental domain that would precede the phenomenologic as more private still, but this would require separate discussion.…”

Infantile defences in parent‐infant psychotherapy: The example of gaze avoidance

“…The intersubjective perspective provides new meanings to many traditional psychoanalytic terms, such as neurosis (Levenson, 2005, p. 65) and countertransference (Gerhardt et al, 2000;Renik andSpillius, 2004, p. 1054). What about defence, the concept investigated in this paper?…”