Attitudes of Embeddedness and Transcendence in Psychoanalysis: Subjectivity, Self-Experience, and Countertransference

Everyone and anyone is much more simply human than otherwise

The continuing paradigm shift in psychoanalysis focuses our attention more than ever on our subjectivity and the powerful impact it has on our selves and others. It compels us to examine more closely our subjectivity and the ways in which it shapes our self-experience, our countertransference, and our patients. It is especially crucial that we examine, however, how our attitudes about our subjectivity fundamentally create and inform how we experience our selves, our beliefs about what we do and what our patients do, and our sense of certainty and conviction vis-à-vis our patients. The attitudes we hold toward our subjectivity represent a meta-organizing principle.** They play a vital role in the way we organize other personal organizing principles and determine among other events how lightly, or tenaciously, we hold our own belief systems.

In the absence of reflection, these attitudes operate in the background, much in the way other organizing principles may operate prereflectively.