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In his encompassing introduction, Bohleber showed the changes in psychoanalytic thinking brought about by the intersubjective point of view. According to him, analysts began to conceive of analyst and patient as a subject-subject relationship structured more by a symmetry than a polar complementarity. This brought about a shift from the intrapsychic to the intersubjective, from subject-object to self and other, from complementarity to mutuality. Bohleber traced the influence of modern philosophy on this approach. He cited Jürgen Habermas and credits Axel Honneth with emphasizing the struggle for recognition which depends on the other. ‘Individuation does not take place in opposition to socialization, but in accordance with it, through mutual recognition.’ It does not, according to Bohleber, account for the destructive potential, nor the other's alien nature.
According to Bohleber, the controversies surrounding intersubjectivity focus on 1) the validity of empirical infant research; 2) the conflict aroused by alterity and the neglect of the presocial and the prereflexive self with its stance against socialization (Whitebook); 3) the innovative encounter with the other, as the other and as alien (Puget and Berenstein) and their distinction between an egocentered relationship to the object such as in transference that causes the object to be represented, and the encounter with actual other that constitutes a presentation. Bohleber summarized Hoffman's approach to both the other and the innovative aspects of psychoanalysis, which resides in the interplay between spontaneity and normal ritualized asymmetry of the analytic situation.
Hoffman presented ‘Sixteen principles of dialectical constructivism’. He stressed that his theory overlaps aspects of relational theory (points 1-8), but that he is critical of some theorists with supposedly relational leanings for their objectivism. At the heart of the eight principles overlapping with relational theory is the recognition of t