Experience‐What is it?

Abstract

The author takes a renewed look at the constitutive aspects of experience, looking at it as process rather than contents. Recently more psychoanalytic voices are discernible that argue for the complexity and multi‐leveled nature of inner experience. Yet the predominant and preeminent psychoanalytic voice has traditionally emphasized the linearity and single‐factored nature of experience and all that is based on it: development, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment. The author offers an understanding of experience as stemming from the operation of two contiguous, ongoing modalities of processing internal and external input, and reflecting two polarities of the subject‐object experience: of separateness and instrumentality, and of oneness and ongoing being. Such a conceptual reframing of experience harbors multiple implications for understanding subjectivity and inter‐subjectivity, inter‐relatedness as well as single‐person psychology, and the all‐important role of an experiential ‘goodness‐of‐fit’ in the analytic situation and elsewhere.

Key words:

• experience
• subjectivity
• intersubjectivity
• object relations
• experiential modalities