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Slavin and Kriegman (1998a) write eloquently of the inevitability of conflict—of the psychic undertow in which each person tries to use the other and pull the other into his or her subjective world. Yet, their notion of individual interest recognizes interdependence—that each person must take in the other in order to construct her or his own subjectivity. I was particularly taken by the title of their paper, for I have often thought that for many people the point of entering therapy is to get the other to change. “Be my Other and change for me, because I have always been surrounded by immovable, impermeable objects upon whom I can have no impact, except by destroying them,” is the message of many a patient. In my thinking about intersubjectivity, which has much in common with what these authors describe, the inevitable collision with the different or opposing aims of the other, with the non-identity of one self to another, is the fundamental core of trouble in “subject relations”—even when, as the authors say, caregivers and therapists are good enough. However, this ineluctable blow to eogcentricism is also an opportunity to recognize the separate and equivalent center of the other. Through the other's survival and nonretaliatory assertion of his or her own identity, as Winnicott (1971) first pointed out, we find that there is someone else to love—or, as Stern (1985) suggests, that there are other minds out there in the universe.
The insight—that this fundamental condition should be conceived as distinct from, though intertwined with, biographical relational failures or intrapsychic conflicts—is important in delineating the area of intersubjectivity. This intertwining follows from the notion that we