Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice. By Donna M Orange, George E Attwood & Robert D Stolorow. Hillsdale New York:  The Analytic Press. Pp  109. £24.50.

Psychoanalysis, now a hundred years old (and young) stands not so much as one model, but as a matrix from which innumerable models have appeared over the decades, whether or not accompanied by ‘schools’. The ‘intersubjective approach’, whose ideas have accrued over the last twenty years, represents a particularly exciting departure in American psychoanalysis, well away from the not-so-secure base, as the authors would argue, of ‘classical’ analysis. Working Intersubjectively is a short and useful update of some of this research, particularly as it pertains to psychoanalytic practice.

To start with, Working Intersubjectively presents us with an overview of principles — the implications of seeing psychoanalysis as a complex, mutual field involving the subjectivities of both patient and analyst, and of conceiving development (and pathology) as irreducibly relational and embedded in many intersubjective contexts. We are led decisively, it is argued, from the ‘myth of the isolated mind’ and from the concept of development and treatment as the product of, largely, intrapsychic forces. While linked to other approaches — such as Self Psychology (Kohut), relational theory (Mitchell), empirical psychoanalysis (Stern, modern infant research) and the Independent tradition in Britain, to name a few — the intersubjective approach aims to push contemporary thinking forward to new consequences. Among these consequences are the transcending of any opposition between the ‘intrapsychic’ and the ‘interpersonal’ and conceptualising treatment as comprising an ‘intersubjective