Self Psychology Page | 20th Conference Program
The development of the intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis so far has had four movements, each punctuated by a book. In the first, Faces in a Cloud, having demonstrated through psychobiographical studies that psychoanalytic metapsychologies derive profoundly from the personal, subjective worlds of their creators, we concluded that what psychoanalysis needs is a theory of subjectivity itself, a unifying framework that can account not only for the phenomena that other theories address but also for the theories themselves. In the second, Structures of Subjectivity, we introduced the concept of an intersubjective field—the system formed by differently organized, reciprocally interacting subjective worlds—as the fundamental theoretical construct for this framework. In the third, Psychoanalytic Treatment, we applied the intersubjectivity principle to an array of important clinical issues, such as analysis of transference and resistance, therapeutic action, and treatment of borderline and psychotic states. In the fourth, Contexts of Being, we circled back to four foundational pillars of psychoanalytic theory—the unconscious, mind-body relations, trauma, and fantasy—and resituated them from an intersubjective perspective. Picking up on the title of this last book, we now offer a fifth movement, a book devoted to a broad-based philosophy of psychoanalytic practice that we refer to as contextualism.
The first chapter presents an overview of the basic principles of intersubjectivity theory and illustrates their clinical application through a vignette. In the second we offer a contextualist critique of the concept of psychoanalytic technique, and in the third we do the same for the myth of analytic neutrality. The fourth chapter examines the intersubjective contexts of extreme states of psychological disintegration. In the fifth and final chapter we explore what it means, philosophically and clinically, to think and work contextually. Our hope, embedded in each of these chapters, is to convey to our readers the essential ingredients of a contextualist sensibility.