Commentary on Civitarese

I enjoyed reading Giuseppe Civitarese's eloquent and conceptually rich paper. His remarkably clear presentation of Husserl and of his own perspective on intersubjectivity makes a powerful argument about the central issues facing contemporary psychoanalysis: what does intersubjectivity mean in practice and how best to conceive of it? My discussion has three parts. First I take up the paper itself, its organization, methods, and aims. Next I comment on the version of intersubjectivity that Civitarese advances. Last, I offer my own experience of learning about the concept and how it has influenced my practice in an ongoing process of growth.

In his paper, Civitarese presents in some detail the development of Husserl's thought. In his early work, Husserl struggled to make sense of the notion of empathy as a way of connecting the subject with others around him. Most commentators would agree that this project was not successful. Many later theorists, in both psychology and philosophy, confronted the same problem (of other minds) and, it might be said, remain stuck in a tautological and tendentious use of empathy as a core notion. Cognitive neuroscience still debates how to solve the apparent problem of recognizing that we are surrounded by others with minds like our own. This difficulty of escaping the Cartesian dilemma of the isolated subject has been extensively challenged by phenomenologists, notably by Heidegger and by Husserl in his later work, recognizing that the subject begins life immersed in an intersubjective world. Civitarese masterfully unravels and explains Husserl's new approach, largely found in unpublished notes and manuscripts, in which he proposed that subjectivity and intersubjectivity originate together in a dialectical, prereflexive, transcendental unity. Obviously, this genre of formulation remains both extremely abstract and almost impossible to imagine in terms of infantile or neonatal life. As Civitarese