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First and foremost I wish to thank Dana Birksted-Breen and the IJP editors for asking me to contribute my work as a key paper for the new section of contemporary conversations and publishing it with the comments of three distinguished analysts. I also wish to thank Florence Guignard, Helmut Hinz and Paul Sandler for the attention they have given to my paper, their praise and criticism.
I feel I should immediately clarify how I use the term “intersubjective”: it can often lead to misunderstandings - as can the terms “interpersonal” and “relational”. It may be used in both a general and a specific way. I use it as a synonym of “in the field” - to indicate a model of psychoanalysis in which the analyst's main subject matter is not the the patient's psyche, his inner world, his unconscious fantasies, but rather the truth of the actual emotional experience, created and felt by both the patient and the analyst: the “something in between” the former and the later (Bion), the intersubjective third (Ogden), the analytic field (Ferro); the truth (reality) which cannot be seized by the senses, only intuited.
However controversial, Freudian psychoanalysis is commonly defined as a uni-personal psychology (the expression recurs 639 times in the PEP). I also wish to point out that I would never dream of saying that “the analytic treatment consists in laying patients down on a couch and letting them ‘get on with their analysis on their own’”: in Florence Guignard's text, the final part of the sentence is placed between inverted commas and one could think she is quoting my work. She is not, the sentence is not mine.
As Florence Guignard and Hinz underline, one could also be correct in saying that IPs are already “intersubjective”. However this is only true in broadly speaking terms. It is not so when related to Bionian and post-Bionian theories of the analytic field (as for instance, in the radical use of the concept of dream in the session, roleplay of ‘characters’, ‘unsaturated’ inte