On being objective about the subjective: Clinical aspects of intersubjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper attempts to set out the conceptual history of countertransference and intersubjectivity. I will attempt to show the different histories that have occurred within British object relations compared with the developments in the post-ego-psychology era in North America.

Keywords:

• countertransference
• intersubjectivity

Notes

¹I believe that the term “ahistorical” was first used about psychoanalysis by J.F. Brown in his text Psychology and the Social Order (Brown, 1936).

²A particular feature of this kind of intersubjectivity is that one element goes inside the other. Bion described this in order to link (probably rightly) this kind of conjoining to Oedipal phantasies and conflicts.

³Winnicott is therefore claimed by those who wish to retain the focus on interacting subjects (e.g., Benjamin, 2004), and those like Ogden who emphasize the unitary production of the pair.

⁴Ogden (2004) acknowledged his debt to Winnicott: “My own conception of analytic intersubjectivity represents an elaboration and extension of Winnicott's (1960) notion that ‘there is no such thing as an infant [apart from the maternal provision]’” (p. 39n).