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The impersonal machine, the autonomous ego, the omnipotent agent, the inviolable and pristine self—all such images of the mind insulated from the constitutive impact of the surround counteract … what might be termed “the unbearable embeddedness of being.”
This new sense of a subjective self opens up the possibility for… the new domain of intersubjective relatedness.
When the totality of space between, outside, and within our bodies becomes the site of pleasure, then desire escapes the borders of the imperial phallus and resides on the shores of endless worlds.
A basic premise among the various psychoanalytic theories of intersubjectivity (Aron, 1996; Benjamin, 1988; Stern, 1985; Stolorow et al., 1987) is that experience is subjective and contextual.** According to one such theoretical system, a useful distinction can be made between the content of experience, and the principles that structure the organization of that content (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984). These structures are, eventually and inevitably, what give rise to the sense of self or identity,