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If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true—that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound.
In our earlier efforts to formulate the basic theoretical constructs for a psychoanalytic science of human experience (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1983; Atwood and Stolorow, 1984), two fundamental ideas gradually crystallized as central guiding principles. First, we found the concept of an intersubjective field—a system of differently organized, interacting subjective worlds—to be invaluable in illuminating both the vicissitudes of psychoanalytic therapy and the process of human psychological development. Second, the concept of concretization—the encapsulation of organizations of experience by concrete, sensorimotor symbols—was seen to illuminate a diverse array of psychological phenomena, including neurotic symptoms,