An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition

This article formulates an object relations perspective based on the complementarity of intrapsychic and intersubjective aspects of self-development. Object relations theories, even those interested in intersubjectivity, have not followed up on Winnicott's (1971) crucial distinction between the subjectively conceived object and the objectively perceived, outside other. With few exceptions, notably Stern (1985), theorists have overlooked the core element of intersubjectivity, which is mutual recognition. The development of the capacity for mutual recognition can be conceived as a separate trajectory from the internationalization of object relations. The subject gradually becomes able to recognize the other person's subjectivity, developing the capacity for attunement and tolerance of difference. To elaborate on this process, the article discusses differentiation in the first 2 years of life. It suggests that Mahler's rapprochement period can be reinterpretated as a struggle for recognition in which the outcome is not simply object constancy, but the beginning ability to recognize another person's subjectivity. The differentiation process consists not merely of separation, but the continual breakdown and repair of mutuality in the psyche's stance toward the outside. Accepting the inevitability of breakdown and reconstruction of the outside other allows considerable room for the role of intrapsychic fantasy and aggression, which might otherwise be neglected in relational theories of the self.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would … become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling … that he had an equivalent center of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (Eliot, 1871/1965,