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IN A PREVIOUS PAPER (Rosenberg, 1971) some ideas were suggested about changes in the concept of experience. Among these was that the history of psychology, to the end of the 19th century, had been a gradual refinement of the analysis of individual behaviour. The psychophysiological techniques of Wundt, Brentano, Titchener, and others lay bare the increasing complexity and mechanisms of individual behaviour. Freud's thought was the great flowering of this historic line of analysis of the individual.
Beginning with the social and ego psychologists, the emphasis gradually changed from this vertical analysis of the individual to a horizontal interactional process, that is one person interacting and coexisting with another; where attention shifted from analysis of the individual to analysis of how the individual interacts with another person in a social situation. In other words, instead of looking at the person and his past developmentally and historically, there came into being an increasing emphasis on looking at a person horizontally, that is, at his immediate interpersonal experiences. Some of the words that belong to the individual are those that have to do with such concepts as developmental, motivational, ego. Some of the words that have to do with the horizontal, social interactional process, and it is a process, are sympathy, empathy, involvement, commitment, that is, interactional terms.
Individual analysis came at the apogee of a long and magnificent history of intellectual effort. It represents a complex, subtle,