You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to discuss Dr. Kernberg's paper, “Intersubjectivity and the Third Position.” When I was a resident in psychiatry at the NYS Psychiatric Institute, I trained on the General Clinical Service, 5th Floor, from 1973 to 1974, and then again as Senior Resident for 6 months at the beginning of 1975. Dr. Kernberg was the Director of the service during this period, having recently come to NYC from the Menninger Clinic. PI 5 offered intensive psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy for selected patients in a specialized milieu, rivaling the offerings of private hospitals such as Austen Riggs, but in a state hospital. Hard as it is to imagine today, patients could stay for 18 months to 2 years. Many patients had borderline and narcissistic character disorders. We saw patients three times per week, supervision was analytic, and the environment was highly charged for both patients and staff. My growth as an analyst began there under the aegis of Dr. Kernberg.
In his paper, Dr. Kernberg offers a survey of current psychoanalytic thinking. He describes the development of two broad trends. He compares and contrasts the tenets of what he calls the “contemporary mainstream of psychoanalysis” with the tenets of the intersubjectivist-object relations movement. In particular, Dr. Kernberg examines the renewed interest in the analyst-patient relationship, the analyst's position, the function of interpretation, and the ultimate goals of psychoanalysis. In his critique, the contemporary mainstream has come to include consideration of the interpersonal field along with its traditional intrapsychic focus, whereas the intersubjectivist-object relations approaches preclude exploration of the intrapsychic unconscious in favor of examination of the interpersonal matrix. In other words, there continue to be essential differences between theories despite shared positions; the “differences,” to paraphrase Fine and Fine, do “make a difference.”
In his review of t