Impasse, Affectivity, and Intersubjective Systems

An important development in the contemporary move from Cartesian isolated-mind thinking in psychoanalysis toward a post-Cartesian contextualism that recognizes the constitutive role of relatedness in the making of all experience has been the theoretical and clinical focus on the concept of intersubjectivity. Recent psychoanalytic discourse on intersubjectivity, however, has been clouded and befuddled by the intermixing and confounding of different uses of the term intersubjective that have distinctly different meanings at different levels of abstraction and generality (Stolorow, Orange, & Atwood, 2001a). Developmentalists such as Stern (1985) have used the term intersubjective relatedness to refer to the developmental capacity to recognize another person as a separate subject. In a similar vein, Benjamin (1995), drawing on Hegel's (1807) idea that self-consciousness is achieved through the reflection of one's consciousness in the consciousness of another, has defined intersubjectivity as mutual recognition. Ogden (1994), by contrast, seems to have equated intersubjectivity with what for me is only one of its dimensions, a domain of shared experience that is prereflective and largely bodily, what I prefer to call unconscious nonverbal affective communication. For my collaborators and me, intersubjectivity has a meaning that is much more general and inclusive, referring to the relational contexts in which all experience, at whatever developmental level—linguistic or prelinguistic, shared or solitarytakes