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The vision of an integrative psychoanalytic theory persists, although it often is obscured by a present scene of our field’s division into camps. A fuller theorization of what occurs in the interaction of two human subjects that is the psychoanalytic encounter holds a potential key to the future of analysis as a discipline whose practitioners can reunite, rather than breaking into groups whose members cannot address each other. Thus the importance of this foundational work on understanding intersubjectivity by Lewis Kirshner.
The problem of the intersubjective is an ur-problem for psychoanalysis. Its existence was heralded in Freud’s metaphor of the analyst’s listening like a telephone receiver to the patient’s unconscious. According to Freud a properly-trained analyst was capable of proper reception, of an across-analysts reliable, reproducible, and in this sense, objective decoding of this unconscious. Rather than recognizing intersubjectivity, it might well be argued that Freud only recognized “objective-subjectivity” in the analyst’s relationship to the patient. Behind the scenes however, he seemed to know more: for example, when he urged Jung to “master the countertransference” as Jung’s relationship with Spielrein spun out of control. Concerned for the future of the psychoanalytic field in the public eye, Freud made clear in his letters, though he did not wish to advertise in his published writings, that he understood the difficulties easily, perhaps inevitably, introduced into the process by the analyst. Yet he could not bear publicly to leave aside the aspiration to a scientific objectivity embodied in the notion of a correctly-applied psychoanalytic method.
Among analysts, Lewis Kirshner is especially qualified to pull together a great diversity of matters that serve as component pieces to a potentially adequate understanding of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. A fully-invested student of Lacanian analysis in his earlier work, as well as an analyst with s