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Psychoanalytic Treatment— An Intersubjective Approach is the culmination of the development of the concept of intersubjectivity, a concept that was delineated in Atwood and Stolorow's book, Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology . The current book is significant in that a clear distinction is made between the school of thought the audiors call “intersubjectivity” and Kohut's “self psychology.” The present work is offered as an expansion and continuation of “self psychology”— aldiough we are also taken into new territory. While acknowledgment is given to the basic indebtedness to and grounding in Kohut's work, much of this woVk is an attempt to revise Kohut's conceptualizations. However, the audiors still rely on Kohut's concepts of the empathic-introspective mode of investigation, the centrality of self experience, and die self-object function and self-object transference.
The author's aim in this book to apply the intersubjective perspective to all die major aspects of psychoanalytic phenomena: “transference and resistance, conflict formation, therapeutic action, affective and self development, and borderline and psychotic states” (p. 2). These aims are attained, and these issues are successfully explicated. The emphasis on die intersubjective is what distinguishes this book from similar works, especially in terms of its implication for understanding transference and countertrans-ference phenomena.
In the chapter “Reflections on Self Psychology,” certain of Kohut's formulations are critiqued as being reminiscent of mechanistic and reified thinking (a criticism Kohut made of Freudian theory). The authors join Schaefer and George Klein in arguing for the creation of a theory that is logical and theoretically sound. They are critical, for example, of Kohut's use of the term “self to refer to both a psychological structure (which the authors now define as an “organization of experience”) and an existential agent, a person. Kohut's own co