Intersubjectivity and Dialecticism

(Final version accepted 8 November 2011)

To restore silence is the role of objects.

There has been a psychoanalytic civil war being waged in the USA over the last 30 years between what has represented the mainstream tradition of American psychoanalysis, ego psychology, and an upstart that goes by a variety of names but which I will label here intersubjectivity. It may appear at this point that we should declare intersubjectivity the winner. Certainly the range of theorists writing with this outlook have attracted a wide following, and much that is written in contemporary ego psychology can be understood as a response to the various challenges posed by these revisionists. Yet, as André Green (2000) observed, intersubjectivity must be seen as more of a corrective movement than an outright revision of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is and has always been intersubjective. ‘Intersubjectivity’, as a group of contemporary theories, addresses issues that have been present in our theory since Freud, but were inadequately theorized. The division between drive and object, internal and external, has been problematic throughout our history. Green believes that Freud emphasized drive and internality to the detriment of the object in order to focus attention on what was new in his theory. Beginning with Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott, many theorists have sought to rectify that situation. Over the last 30 years we have seen that process intensify as intersubjective theories have come onto the stage and, at times, pushed drive and the intrapsychic to the wings. Any theory that eliminates one side of the intrapsychic-intersubjective, drive-object axes creates particular difficulties if it still wishes to be considered psychoanalytic. In their effort to provide the corrective psychoanalysis has long needed, these theorists call attention to the object side, but some also call for a dialectic between the two sides. Critics tend to omit this dial