Knowing Which Way is Up; or, Why all Subjectivities are not Created Equal

As intersubjective and relational perspectives increasingly become part of the broader psychoanalytic landscape, the analytic situation is increasingly being described in terms of the meeting and interaction of two subjectivities, neither of which can claim any capacity to discern “objective” reality. The problems with a correspondence theory of reality are by now well known, with Rorty's (1979) critique, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, being perhaps the most well-known and influential. What we seem to have been left with, however, is an incapacity to articulate what it is that distinguishes the analyst's subjectivity from the patient's. Among psychoanalysts the problem has been jokingly reformulated, “If there's no ‘objective’ difference between the analyst and patient's subjectivities, why is it the analyst who gets paid?” After decades in which the medical model held sway, in which the patient's perspective—as indicated by the very term “patient”— was pathologized, and the doctor's perspective presumed to be “objective,” a restoration of some perspectival equality was certainly in order. Similarly, the classical Freudian model traditionally depended on notions of “distortion” in its conceptualization of the transference. Kohut's great contribution was conceptualizing the centrality of the empathic stance, by which the subjective validity of the patient's inner world was explored and acknowledged, without any implication that this perspective be viewed as distorted and ultimately relinquished.

The intersubjective approach of Stolorow and Atwood (1992) and others has continued to expand our understanding of the way an individual's unconscious organizing principles shape and are shaped by his or her relational context. Like Rorty, they rely on a perception-based metaphor, extending to the cognitive and emotive realms, a picture of the organization of incoming stimuli, such