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Contemporary psychoanalytic discourse has directed considerable attention to examining and defining the analytic subject (Ogden 1994), the subjectivity of patient or analyst (Hoffman 1983; Aron 1996; Bollas 1989; Renik 1993), the intersubjective context of being (Stolorow and Atwood 1992), and the state, or process, of mutual recognition or “intersubjectivity” (Benjamin 1995). Several authors have in the past decade ventured a model of the analytic subject—though tending not to fuss with the distinction between subject (or subjectivity) and self—as multiply constituted (Bromberg 1996; Mitchell 1993; Davies 1996; Pizer 1996). The human subject emerges in current literature as paradoxically both centered and decentered, singular and multiple, private and interdependent—a creature who dwells in both a monadic psychic reality and a dyadic potential space, and whose truths, tales, and transformations are relationally negotiated (Bromberg 1995; Pizer 1998) or constructed (Gergen 1994).
Roger Kennedy contributes a scholarly and compendious volume in which he inquires into the location of the “human subject” and advocates a “subject relations” theory for psychoanalysis. Kennedy argues that the human subject is “elusive” because it is without center or stasis, and cannot be conceived without recognition of context, process, and dynamics—that is, the interactive social field. For Kennedy there is no subject in the absence of other subjects, indeed a network of other subjects. As he writes, “there is no one centre in this network; rather I would conceive of a series of ‘contact points,’ where subjects meet one another” (p. 7). Kennedy goes on to assert that “the organization that involves the subject, that I shall call the ‘subjective organization,’ goes beyond that of the individual as such and includes the realm of the social, and thus cuts into what can be seen mistakenly as two separate realms, the individual and the social” (p. 8). Kennedy argues that psychoanalysis is par