Commentary on Civitarese

Answering a question with a question (Aron and Henik 2009), as my Jewish colleagues teach me to do, can challenge the most devoted hermeneut or phenomenologist. When asked to comment on Giuseppe Civitarese's paper, I faced the question whether and how to respond to this scholarly, dense, and intriguing text. Temptations abounded: from listing my many points of agreement to commenting on the sneaky charm of Civitarese's allusion to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, a favorite of mine too. Altogether the honor of being so invited and so challenged intrigued me; responding requires me to acknowledge the incompleteness of what it will be possible to take up, and of the questions that time, space, and my own limitations will allow me to frame. My questions, I hope, will not mask my admiration. Thank you to this author and to the editors of JAPA for obliging me to question my previous beliefs, for rattling my cage.

Following three main topics—phenomenology, intersubjectivity, and post-Bionian field theory—Civitarese maps analytic intersubjectivity onto a spectrum of versions from weak (individual-oriented) through strong (field-oriented), characterized by a focus on “the transindividual essence of subjectivity” (p. 854). Psychoanalytic intersubjectivity is strong, he claims, if “(1) it is based on a radical social theory of how the psyche is born; and (2) it develops a clinical technique consistent with these assumptions” (p. 854). He regards his preferred variant (“post-Bionian”) as the best, perhaps the only legitimately strong, intersubjectivity (though he suggests that Thomas Ogden's probably also qualifies). All others are more or less weak. We can see that his scale resembles that of Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) in their valuation of psychoanalytic theories as more or less relational, setting the stage for all of Mitchell's later work (1988, 1993, 1997, 2000). My discussion will follow the path of Civitarese, raising questions along the way, but al