Subjectivity And Intersubjectivity Of Clinical Facts

The author has learned a great deal from the IJPA 75th Anniversary Issue, particularly regarding ways in which psychoanalysts across the world are consensually re-defining psychoanalysis as a quintessentially subjective and intersubjective endeavour. In summarising her response to the Issue, she addresses the ways in which its focus on psychoanalytic subjectivity and intersubjectivity helps to define the nature of psychoanalysis as a scientific endeavour. In addition, she identifies an area that she wished had been more developed in the Issue: some further specification of the cognitive and communicative processes that make for psychoanalytic subjectivity and intersubjectivity. She speculates that, as we continue our attempts further to understand those processes, we may find it valuable to look towards a body of research that is absent from consideration in the 75th Anniversary Issue (and is, for that matter, absent from serious and scientific consideration by psychoanalysts in general): research on mental effects currently considered ‘anomalous’, or outside the bounds of conventionally defined human mental function and capacity. She describes briefly some of that research in the context of its possible relevance to issues of psychoanalytic subjectivity and intersubjectivity. She takes up the specific relevance of that research to phenomena we have traditionally subsumed under categories of experience like intuition, empathic attunement and unconscious communication.