The Intersubjective Approach: Commentary on Michael Tansey's “Psychoanalytic Expertise” (PD, 2[3], 1992)

In a recent article, Tansey (1992) erroneously depicts the intersubjective approach to psychoanalysis as a simple developmental-arrest model that neglects the role of inner conflict and denies the value of interpretation. On the basis of one unusual clinical vignette, he makes the absurd generalization that my collaborators and I (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987) “frown upon” an analyst's ever disagreeing with a patient—a prohibition that would be tantamount to requiring that the analyst's subjectivity be banished from the therapeutic system, as if an analyst could gaze upon a patient's experience with pure and presuppositionless eyes.

Contrary to Tansey's mischaracterization, my collaborators and I (Stolorow, 1985; Stolorow and Brandchaft, 1987; Stolorow et al., 1987, chap. 6) have for years been challenging the false dichotomy, perpetuated both by classical analysts and some self psychologists (and now Tansey), between inner conflict and developmental failure, and we have proposed a conceptualization of conflict formation that is consistent with relational-model theorizing. Consider, for example, the following passages:

When conflict is freed from the encumbering image of an energy disposal apparatus and is pictured solely as a subjective state of the person, then the supposed antithesis between conflict theory and self psychology vanishes. When conflict is liberated from the doctrine of the primacy of instinctual drive, then the specific meaning-contexts that give rise to subjective states of conflict becomes an empirical question to be explored psychoanalytically. The focus of psychoanalytic inquiry then shifts from the presumed vicissitudes of drive to the intersubjective contexts in which conflict states crystallize … [Stolorow et al., 1987, p. 89].