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Among Today's interpersonally trained analysts, the terms “coconstructed,” “intersubjective,” and “two person” are addendums to lettered credentials. Countertransference saturates many consulting rooms, even across different “schools” of psychoanalytic thinking (Gabbard, 1995). Aron and Anderson's edited volume, however, brings innovation to what has become nothing short of mainstream, because it considers the historically intrapsychic, private body as inextricably bound to the other.
If Freud took the flesh and its urges as the base of a theory of all inner life, Aron ambitiously counters with his own theory of psychosomatic organization and psychoanalytic cure. Writing the first chapter, he patterns a fabric of ideas using the general theme of the “reflexive mind,” or the capacity to move back and forth between the self as subject and as object. Like many before him (Aron credits Jung, Krystal, Blatt, Bach, and Fonagy, to name but a few), he values holding the tension between one's subjectivity and the perspective of the other as pivotal to psychic vitality. In its absence there is a deficiency in awareness, management, and expression of one's own experience, and also an inability to appreciate and utilize people.
Within this fabric, Aron weaves the thread of the body, believing that the foundation for the capacity for self-reflexivity lies in our bodily sensations. Inspired by the work of Eigen, Aron takes as an example the act of breathing, a concrete model of “ego cohesion and interaction” (p. 23). At what point, he invites us to consider, is one's breath a part of the self, and at what point is it a part of the air, the outside? In developing self-reflexivity, then, it is imperative that the body self bump up against the external world and what is outside, without forsaking what is inside.
Here is the notion of an integrated identity developing intersubjectively, and Aron's mapping of it explains the current deemphasis on positivist interpretation, the limits of