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Intersubjectivity is the cutting edge in psychoanalysis. Or is it? As Lawrence Brown points out in his new book, while the schematic presentation of some of the earliest psychoanalytic metapsychology implied a kind of isolation of mental processes, in fact the interaction and interdependence of minds in the management of experience and the creation of meaning have been an aspect of psychoanalytic understanding from the beginning. Brown reminds us that intersubjectivity is not, in itself, a theory. Rather, it is an aspect of human relatedness, and one that can only be fully understood, he claims, as based upon unconscious processes.
As Stolorow, who popularized the term in his field-theory influenced revision of self-psychology, has pointed out: “Recent psychoanalytic discourse on intersubjectivity … has been clouded and befuddled by the intermixing and confounding of different uses of the term intersubjective that have distinctly different meanings at different levels of abstraction and generality” (2002, p. 329). Developmentalists and relational psychoanalysts use the term to refer to the achievement of a capacity to recognize the other as having a separate subjective experience, while the so-called intersubjectivists use the term to denote the always inevitably social contextual involvement in psychological experience.
By choosing to use this burdened term, rather than simply writing about, say, unconscious communication or exchange, or unconscious use of the object's experience, Brown clearly wishes to engage and challenge those who claim it as an entirely different way of looking at human psychology. In this excellent book, Brown, who is particularly interested in the operation of unconscious communication in the clinical encounter, brings the concept of the intersubjective fully within the purview of an integrated psychoanalytic theory of mind and technique. In doing so, he provides a cogent history of the way that the unconscious processes underlying the interac