Early Light on a “Relatively Neglected” Topic

January 21, 2000. It was disheartening for me to read the first sentence of Peter Buckley's interesting and thoughtful review essay, “Personal History and the Origins of Psychoanalytic Ideas” (JAPA 47/4). That sentence reads, “The influence of personal history, subjective experience, and inner conflict on the origins of psychoanalytic ideas has been a relatively neglected subject” (p. 1392). Buckley is apparently unaware that this “neglected subject” was the central focus

of the book Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (Stolorow and Atwood 1979). Our studies of the personal, subjective origins of the metapsychological theories of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank, revised and updated in the book's second edition (Atwood and Stolorow 1993), formed the basis of what we came to call intersubjectivity theory. In words rather similar to Buckley's, we wrote the following more than two decades ago: “This book is concerned with the subjectivity of psychological knowledge and especially with the subjective origins of universalized metapsychological doctrines …. By systematically interpreting the theories as psychological products embedded in the context of life history and personal phenomenology, we hope to deepen our understanding of the limiting role of these subjective factors. We further intend to use the psychobiographical analyses as points of departure for a discussion of the possibility of a more general and inclusive framework” (Stolorow and Atwood 1979, p. 173).