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In this book, Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood have developed the concept of an intersubjective field as the core explanatory construct for informing psychoanalytic theory and practice. Their conception of a system composed of differently organized, interacting subjective worlds illuminates both the process of psychoanalytic therapy and the stages of human psychic development. The authors apply their intersubjective approach to a wide array of important clinical issues, including the analyses of transference, resistance, and psychic conflict, as well as the psychoanalytic treatment of depressive, borderline, and psychotic patients.
Psychoanalysis is depicted as a science of the intersubjective, focused on the interplay between the differently organized subjective worlds of the observer and the observed. One of the central tenets of their intersubjective approach is that clinical phenomena cannot be understood apart from the intersubjective contexts in which they take form. Patient and analyst together form an inseparable system, and it is this system that constitutes the empirical domain of psychoanalytic inquiry.
The intersubjectivity concept arose in part as a response to the unfortunate tendency of classical analysis to view both psychopathology and the analytic process almost exclusively in terms of intrapsychic processes and mechanisms located wholly with the patient and isolated from the person's interpersonal relations. This isolating focus ignores each individual's irreducible interaction with other humans and obscures the profound ways in which the analyst is implicated in the clinical phenomena he observes and seeks to treat.
The authors assert that two overarching principles guide the conduct of psychoanalytic therapy in all its phases and