The Concept of Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: Taking Critical Stock*

(Final version accepted 1 November 2012)

The past two or three decades have seen nearly all psychoanalytical schools of thought undergo a change towards a stronger intersubjective orientation. Timewise, it took place more or less in parallel within the various schools and above all was fuelled by clinical psychoanalysis and the changing role of the analyst in treatment. In the process the discussion of three concepts drove this development forward: countertransference, enactment and projective identification. The subjectivity of the analyst as an instrument of knowledge was integrated into the concept of countertransference, transference of the patient onto the person of the analyst was extended to the analytical situation as a whole, and concepts like projective identification and enactment were promoted to senior notions in treatment theory. In addition, the role of the analyst as a clinical authority and his or her position as an objective observer of analytical events have been transformed. Nowadays, analytical knowledge acquisition occurs largely on the basis of the interactional events occurring between analyst and analysand. In the course of this clinical-theoretical development the relational psychoanalysis to have emerged from Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis has attained greater influence and significance.

Radical intersubjectivist-relational approaches not only stress the inevitability of a mutual, reciprocal influence but due to the ineluctable subjectivity of the subjects also exclude the possibility of an objective awareness of the psychological reality of the analysand.

The impulses for these further developments also came out of the related sciences, attachment theory, empirical infant and early child research and, of late, out of the neurosciences. Developmental research has shown how, from the outset, the childlike self emerges from reciprocal regulation and