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An organizing theme in the writings of Stolorow and Atwood is the threat to psychoanalysis' future posed by the proliferation of theories. In Contexts of Being, the theme appears as the goal of creating “a theory of subjectivity itself—a unifying framework that can account not only for the phenomena that other theories address but also for these theories themselves” (p. 2). The authors maintain that their “intersubjective perspective” is just such a new unifying framework, one that will enable psychoanalysis to reap the benefits of theoretical unity. The “intersubjective field,” the core notion of their perspective, is “any psychological field formed by interacting worlds of experience, at whatever developmental level these worlds may be organized” (p. 3). The sense of intersubjective field is elaborated within a broad context won through a unique synthesis of factors drawn from Western social and intellectual history. The factors are psychoanalysis, subjective world, intersubjectivity, reification, and alienation. The synthesis is crystallized in “the myth of the isolated mind.”
The “isolated mind” is a reified “subjective world”; its function is to defend against alienation, or inability to accept mortality; this desfensive stance motivates seeking refuge in “an illusion…that there is a sphere of inner freedom from the constraints of animal existence and mortality” (p. 8), or in “reassuring illusions of self-sufficiency and autonomy” that “serve to disavow the intolberable vulnerability of the very structure of psychological life…” (pp. 10-11). Flight from mortality also results in reification of the experience of the world as real and separate from the self so that “this world becomes…a metaphysical absolute, a universal…valid for all human beings” (p. 11), in contrast to the non-reified “subjective sense that there is an enduring…world of reality separate from the self…constituted…by particular intersubjective