Working Intersubjectively

Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice

Donna M. Orange, George E. Atwood, Robert D. Stolorow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317758082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From an overview of the basic principles of intersubjectivity theory, Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow proceed to contextualist critiques of the concept of psychoanalytic technique and of the myth of analytic neutrality. They then examine the intersubjective contexts of extreme states of psychological disintegration, and conclude with an examination of what it means, philosophically and clinically, to think and work contextually. This lucidly written and cogently argued work is the next step in the development of intersubjectivity theory. In particular, it is a clinically grounded continuation of Stolorow and Atwood's Contexts of Being (TAP, 1992), which reconceptualized four foundational pillars of psychoanalytic theory -- the unconscious, mind-body relations, trauma, and fantasy -- from an intersubjective perspective. Working Intersubjectively expounds and illustrates the contextualist sensibility that grows out of this reconceptualization. Like preceding volumes in the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series by Robert Stolorow and his colleagues, it will be theoretically challenging and clinically useful to a wide readership of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapists.

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Intersubjectivity Theory and the Clinical Exchange

The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him.

—Hans-Georg Gadamer
Truth and Method

By intersubjectivity theory we mean the psychoanalytic theory articulated in Structures of Subjectivity (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984) and developed in Psychoanalytic Treatment (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987), in Contexts of Being (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992), and in Emotional Understanding (Orange, 1995). An early formulation of this viewpoint said that “psychoanalysis seeks to illuminate phenomena that emerge within a specific psychological field constituted by the intersection of two subjectivities—that of the patient and that of the analyst” (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, p. 64).

Intersubjectivity theory is a metatheory of psychoanalysis. It examines the field—two subjectivities in the system they create and from which they emerge—in any form of psychoanalytic treatment. Because of this focus, intersubjectivity theory also implies a contextualist view of development and of pathogenesis:

Psychological development and pathogenesis are best conceptualized in terms of the specific intersubjective contexts that shape the developmental process and that facilitate or obstruct the child’s negotiation of critical developmental tasks and successful passage through developmental phases. The observational focus is the evolving psychological field constituted by the interplay between the differently organized subjectivities of child and caretakers [p. 65].

Intersubjectivity theory intends to describe the emergence and modification of subjectivity, and defines these processes as irreducibly relational.

It is important to distinguish this use of the terms “intersubjective” and “intersubjectivity” from several related ideas. First, intersubjectivity theorists intend a relatedness that can exist between any two people as subjects. Thus, these terms do not refer primarily to a developmental achievement. Stern (1985), for example, describes a stage and process of recognition of another’s subjectivity as connected and responsive to one’s own. This mutual recognition may be a late achievement in the intersubjective field of an analysis, especially in patients like those described by Guntrip (1969) and Kohut (1971), and thus differs from our contextualist conception of an intersubjective field.

In addition, intersubjectivity theory differs from systems theory, as defined, for example, in the family-systems theory of Bowen and his collaborators¹ (Kerr and Bowen, 1988). Intersubjectivity requires subjectivity, or rather two or more subjectivities, and retains its focus on the interplay between differently organized subjectivities. We cannot work within the intersubjective field and simultaneously step outside the field to describe it, as family-systems theorists attempt to do, from a God’s-eye view.

This impossibility may also account for what appears as psychoanalytic disinterest in empirical research. Positivist philosophers like Grunbaum (1984) and psychoanalysts like Spence (1993) find psychoanalysis unscientific, but they have misunderstood the essential nature of the intersubjective field. Even the best case studies can only feebly attempt to capture the feel of a particular intersubjective field, or of an analytic couple. We must examine the theories, prejudices, and assumptions that form our own subjectivity, but we can work psychoanalytically and understand psychoanalytically only from within the intersubjective field.

Third, for similar reasons, intersubjectivity theory differs from interpersonalism. Intersubjectivity theory concerns itself little with interpersonalist concerns like who is doing what to whom, with gambits and control. What interpersonalists call “participant observation” requires, we believe, maintaining an external perspective that interferes with “undergoing the situation” with the patient (Gadamer, 1975b). In our view, relational contexts are mutually constitutive: as students of aesthetics sometimes say, the writer creates the reader and the reader brings the writer into being. Intersubjectivity theory, although interested in the experience of interaction and agency, resembles more closely those currents in relational thinking that emphasize development (Bollas, 1987; Ghent, 1992; Winnicott, 1958) and conversation between differently organized and inevitably subjective perspectives (Aron, 1996; Orange, 1995).

On the other hand, intersubjectivity theory transcends the Freudian view of human beings. In classical theory we are selfcontained bundles of better or more poorly harnessed sexual and aggressive instincts, some directed at “objects.” Intersubjectivity theory sees humans as organizers of experience, as subjects. It 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 (Orange, 1995).

BASIC THEORETICAL CONCEPTS AND THEIR HISTORY

Although intersubjectivity theory is a recent arrival on the psychoanalytic scene, its roots appear in early phenomenology. Like Freud, Husserl studied with the philosopher Brentano, who unrelentingly emphasized the experience of the intentional subject. Unlike Freud, who—at least intermittently—embraced scientific empiricism, Husserl and later philosophers of subjectivity claimed that all experience is subjective experience.

The original authors of psychoanalytic intersubjectivity theory, influenced as well by personology theory (Murray, 1938) and by their own researches into the subjective origins of personality theories (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993), recognized in Kohut’s work the more radical perspective needed. Though he welcomed and promoted exchange between psychoanalysis and the other humanistic disciplines, Kohut (1959) insisted that the entire domain of psychoanalytic inquiry is subjective experience. He implicitly rejected drive theory, along with metapsychological constructs generally. The only data for psychoanalytic understanding, Kohut believed, are those that are accessible by introspection and empathy. Intersubjectivity theory does criticize particular aspects of self-psychological theory, such as the concepts of transmuting internalization via optimal frustration and a preexisting nuclear self. Nevertheless, it completely accepts self psychology’s most fundamental tenet, its definition of the sources of psychoanalytic inquiry and understanding as well as its conviction that self-experience is radically context-dependent—that is, rooted in specific contexts of relatedness.

In the early 1980s Bernard Brandchaft, who brought extensive and intensive understanding of British relational theories, began to make important contributions to the evolution of intersubjectivity theory. The phenomenological approach that emerged from the studies collected in Faces in a Cloud (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979), with its thoroughgoing emphasis on the development and maintenance of the organization of experience, thus moved toward a fully intersubjective conception. In this view, all selfhood—including enduring patterns of personality and pathology—develops and is maintained within, and as a function of, the interplay between subjectivities. Conversely the field itself consists of the relatedness between subjectivities. The people may be parent and child, siblings, analyst and patient, spouses, or other combinations. Intersubjectivity theory sees pathologies, from phobias through psychoses, in these terms. In other words, it radically refuses to place the origins or the continuance of psychopathology solely within the patient. This point of view, therefore, differs with drive theory in all its variants. Because self psychology and phenomenology have taught us to emphasize subjective experience, we also differ with interpersonalists who locate difficulties in living in the patient’s desire for control, in repetitive enactments of earlier relational patterns, or in disavowal of responsibility. Instead, we study the intersubjective conditions, or emotional context, in which particular subjective configurations arise and are maintained.

The principal components of subjectivity, in our view, are the organizing principles, whether automatic and rigid, or reflective and flexible. These principles, often unconscious, are the emotional conclusions a person has drawn from lifelong experience of the emotional environment, especially the complex mutual connections with early caregivers. Until these principles become available for conscious reflection, and until new emotional experience leads a person to envision and expect new forms of emotional connection, these old inferences will thematize the sense of self. This sense of self includes convictions about the relational consequences of possible forms of being. A person may feel, for example, that any form of self-articulation or differentiation will invite ridicule or sarcasm.

Within this perspective, we have attempted to rethink such fundamental psychoanalytic ideas as the unconscious. The “pre-reflective unconscious” is the home of those organizing principles, or emotional convictions, that operate automatically and out of awareness. They arise as emotional inferences a child draws from intersubjective experience in the family of origin. These principles may concern relatedness, as in “I must adapt to others’ needs (moods, expectations, and so on) if I am to retain significant emotional ties.” They may also consist in a fundamental sense of self, still intersubjectively configured: “I will never amount to anything,” “I am always a burden,” “I am worthless and good-for-nothing.” Such organizing principles are sometimes direct quotations from parents who nickname their children “Mad Mary” or “Terrible Theresa” or “good-for-nothing.” More often, these principles are emotional inferences drawn as the child attempts to organize some sense of self out of chaotic, traumatic, or more subtly confusing early and later relational experience.

We (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992) have also described a dynamic unconscious. This consists of emotional information, once consciously known, that had to be “sequestered,” or forgotten, because it created conflict for the subject. In particular, the memory would threaten the tie to caregivers on whom the child needed to depend. This form of unconsciousness is dynamic, as in Freudian theory, because the effects of such early experience, unavailable for reflection, continue to appear as repetitive troubles in an adult’s life. Memories of parental cruelty that conflict with needed idealizations are obvious examples.

Finally, the “unvalidated unconscious” describes those aspects of subjective life that could never fully become experience because they never found a validating response in the emotional environment. Often aspects of one’s talents and interests, one’s character, as well as of the crises and quandries of one’s emotional life have never found the recognition they needed to become fully real for the person.

THE CLINICAL EXCHANGE

An intersubjective understanding of psychopathology and of unconsciousness has important consequences for psychoanalytic practice. Psychoanalysis will consist in the mutual creation of an emotional environment, an intersubjective field, in which it is safe to explore together those “regions” of unconsciousness that make up the problematic aspects of subjectivity. The interplay of transference and countertransference (or cotransference, Orange, 1994), the organizing activity of both patient and analyst within the analytic experience, makes up the intersubjective field of the analysis. The joint effort to understand both past and present organizing activity as a function of the experience of particular intersubjective fields means that past and present are always dialogically involved, implicitly at least; with those who cannot even try to understand the past and have no access at all to it, explicit dialogue between past and present may be many years ahead....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Intersubjectivity Theory and the Clinical Exchange
• 2 Beyond Technique: Psychoanalysis as a Form of Practice
• 3 The Myth of Neutrality
• 4 Contexts of Nonbeing: Varieties of the Experience of Personal Annihilation
• 5 Thinking and Working Contextually
• Epilogue
• References
• Index