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The writing of this “odyssey” was stimulated by informal discussions that occurred during the Twelfth Annual Conference on the Psychology of the Self in San Francisco , which raised questions about the relationship between self psychology and the theory of intersubjectivity. By tracing the origins of the concepts of the subjective world and intersubjectivity in my own intellectual development, I hope in this essay to clarify the nature of the relationship between these ideas and the framework of self psychology.
The formal roots of my interest in subjectivity go back to the period of my doctoral studies in clinical psychology at Harvard, from 1965 to 1970. During that period Harvard was a wonderful place for a clinical psychologist to grow up in intellectually. The clinical psychology program was actually not part of a psychology department; it was set in the Department of Social Relations, which had been formed by leading scholars from four disciplines—sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and personality psychology—all of whom shared a common interest and background in psychoanalysis. Thus, instead of studying the experimental psychology of rats, I had the privilege of learning about social systems theory from Talcott Parsons,