Sameness, Difference, Play and Fear in the i—You Encounter

The intersubjective relational school has challenged us as psychotherapists to reexplore two most basic modes of being, the experience of being an autonomous individual and of being contextually constructed and experienced. In essence, our experience of self is embedded in two mutually creating and negating worldviews, which stand in a dialectic tension between the intersubjective dyad and the monadic self. Since each worldview aspires to account for all psychological phenomena in their entirety, the monadic self must accommodate the phenomena of alterity within a cognitive-affective schema. Similarly, the intersubjective dyadic self must attempt to accommodate for all intrapsychic phenomena including singularity. Such integral and comprehensive modes of being not only strive to encompass all psychological experience but also to translate that experience into each mode's unique cognitive-affective language. While ontologically symmetrical with regard to the phenomena described, each mode of being entails asymmetrical subjective languages in the actual description. Thus the monadic—dyadic dialectic presents paradoxically a simultaneous mutual understanding and containing as well as an interminable dissonance. While the mutuality hints of sameness, implying a sense of “it takes one to know one,” there is an ever-present sense of difference, as in right and left, man and woman, monadic and dyadic, implying that “things seen from here can't be seen from there.” Therefore, it seems