This paper presents an overview of our efforts to rethink the conceptual and methodological foundations of psychoanalysis. These efforts have been guided by three general considerations. First, we have felt that any new framework should be capable of preserving the contributions made by the classical analytic theorists and of translating these contributions into a common conceptual language. Second, it is our view that the theory of psychoanalysis should be formulated on an experience-near level of discourse, closely anchored in the phenomena of clinical observation. The third guiding consideration is found in our belief that an adequate theory of personality should illuminate the structure, significance, origins, and therapeutic transformations of personal subjective worlds in all their richness and diversity.

The intellectual heritage upon which we have drawn in fashioning our “psychoanalytic phenomenology” is a very broad one, embracing the hermeneutic tradition in the philosophy of history, aspects of the existential-phenomenological movement, basic concepts