Intersubjectivity and dialecticism

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Notes

1. New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

2. Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives.

3. The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

4. Donnel Stern, a relational analyst, provided this view. Benjamin sees herself as a relational analyst who works in the theoretical ‘category’ of intersubjectivity (personal communications).

5. For a more complete presentation of this topic, see Frie and Reis (2001) and Sass (1989).

6. The other analyst influenced significantly by Heidegger was his one‐time student, Hans Loewald. Loewald is often cited by intersubjectivists as an important progenitor.

7. Ricoeur called psychoanalysis a ‘mixed discourse’ that is defined by an interpretive approach, based in the coherence of understanding and meaning, as well as by a mechanistic approach, based in explanation and force.

8. “The first is based on a glance that sees nothing: the King and then the police. The second is based on a glance which sees that the first sees nothing and deceives itself into thereby believing to be covered by what it hides: the Queen and then the Minister. The third is based on a glance which sees that the first two glances leave what must be hidden uncovered to whomever would seize it: the Minister, and finally Dupin” (Lacan, 2006, p. 10).

9. Hoffman refers to it not as intersubjectivity, but rather as the contemporary ‘paradigm shift’ in psychoanalysis, which he calls one of ‘constructivism.’

10. Philip Bromberg, Bernard Friedland, James Fosshage, Emmanuel Ghent and Stephen Mitchell.

11. Most prominent among them were Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Clara Thompson.

12. As theorized by Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey.

13. A theory of philosophy by Percy Williams Bridgman defined in Wikipedia as: ‘the process of defining a fuzzy concept so as to make the concept measurable in form of variables consisting of specific observations.’

14. “Since I began doing psycho‐analysis and intensive psychotherapy nine years ago, I have found, time after time, that in the course of the work with every one of my patients who has progressed to, or very far toward, a thoroughgoing analytic cure, I have experienced romantic and erotic desires to marry, and fantasies of being married to, the patient. Such fantasies and emotions have appeared in me usually relatively late in the course of treatment, have been present not briefly but usually for a number of months, and have subsided only after my having experienced a variety of feelings – frustration, separation‐anxiety, grief, and so forth – entirely akin to those which attended what I experienced as the resolution of my Oedipus complex late in my personal analysis – specifically, about five years ago” (Searles, 1959, p. 284).