Response

I believe that Vic Sedlak is correct in asserting that there is a distinction between intersubjectivity as it is understood in some psychoanalytic literature (usual in his cultural context) and the idea as it appears in relational analysis (which may indeed be radical but is common in North America). The idea that the data and the relationship between analyst and patient are co-created means something different in each context, and we define this difference differently. In order to address the clinical manifestations it seems wise to clarify the very different assumptions at work.

I should start with Sedlak's statement that (1) what defines the intersubjective approach is the necessity of using our own personality subjectivity to understand the patient, and (2) that it is an unfortunate fact that we have no other means, or measuring instrument to judge meaning and emotional quality, so we must make the best of a bad job. My view, by contrast (see Benjamin, 2005) is developmental and postulates that (1) intersubjectivity is constituted by the fact that from the beginning of life we depend on creating patterns of mutual regulation and recognition with the other in order to develop. Experiencing and understanding together these patterns and failures associated with them form the heart of our work. (2) Since recognition of intentions and feelings of one by another are the crucial building blocks of attachment and all subsequent personal engagement, it is not a “bad job” that we use ourselves in analysis. Rather it is the essence of psychic life and determining for psychoanalysis that one subject needs to be known by another like subject.

Neither fortunate nor unfortunate this condition of psychic life is (as we used to joke about gravity) ‘not just a good idea, it's the law’. The idea of the moral third relates not to morality as commonly understood but the idea that patterns of engagement are necessary to human interaction, and when things go well create the sense of a l