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.
September 4, 1999. I was pleased that Robert Stolorow and Donna Orange found much that they were in sympathy with in their review of my Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Modern Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (JAPA 47/2). However, in drawing a distinction between their own conception of intersubjectivity and my discussion of the topic, they misconstrue some of the book's central arguments, which I hope to clarify here.
Stolorow and Orange suggest that I equate intersubjectivity with language. In fact, this is precisely what I dispute. I argue at length against the postmodern trend in philosophy and psychoanalysis, which sees subjectivity only as a product of the language we speak. For many postmodern theorists, subjectivity follows from our linguistic relation to others. As a result, linguistic intersubjectivity is taken as a starting point and subjectivity is construed in relation to it.
I argue, in contrast, that linguistic conceptions of intersubjectivity do not account for prelinguistic and nonverbal forms of experience. The point is that intersubjective experience always includes the affective and bodily dimensions, which are central to psychoanalysis but cannot be reduced to language. I also question whether a linguistically constituted theory of the subject can account sufficiently for individual identity and personal agency. In considering the importance of individual subjectivity, I maintain that agency cannot be seen as only an epiphenomenon of language or larger social forms. And I question whether subjectivity is itself entirely a function of intersubjectivity.
Drawing on a line of thought from Fichte and Schelling through Sartre and contemporary German theory, I elaborate individual subjectivity in terms of a basic awareness of self that is prepersonal and prereflective and actually enables self-reflection to take place. I thus draw a distinction between prereflective awareness of self, reminiscent of Winnicott's “private self,” and the “I” of reflect