Intersubjectivity and the Ego

Abstract

Intersubjective analysts have made an important contribution to our current thinking regarding analyst-patient interaction and intersubjectivity has become a major influence in current American psychoanalysis. However, intersubjective and relational phenomena have not been integrated into the personality theory of psychoanalysis, as reflected currently in the structural theory/ ego psychology. Freud's theory of personality, as it has evolved into ego psychology, includes variables relating to the identical phenomena of human experience addressed by the relational and intersubjective analysts. The critiques of Freudian theory by these analysts evidence significant misperceptions about ego psychology. Intersubjective and relational processes are ego functions that can be subsumed within ego psychology without doing violence to their import. Intersubjectivity is the subjective experience of an interpersonal interaction that becomes part of intrapsychic structure. It is a component of the mentalization of interpersonal experience by the ego. The analyst variously experiences the self and the patient as both subject and object, virtually simultaneously, due to the intersubjective nature of clinical interaction. There is only a one-person psychology: the mind of each of analyst and patient represents within itself the mind of the other. A “two-person psychology” is an intrapsychic creation and is contained separately, albeit simultaneously, within the minds of each of the two people. This approach is described in relation to the drives and objects, the interpersonal, the intrapsychic and internal representation; and the nature of the experience within the clinical dyad.