You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the Epilogue to The Restoration of the Self, Heinz Kohut (1977), seeking to understand the increase in the number of self disorders he observed, turned his attention to the changing nature of family process: “The environment which used to be experienced as threateningly close, is now experienced more and more as threateningly distant; where children were formerly over stimulated by the emotional (including the erotic) life of their parents, they are now often under stimulated” (p. 271). These speculations, which shift the focus of the study of intrapsychic life from universal psychological structures to those that arise in the context of a relational field, foreshadow the paradigm shift that Stolorow (1994) calls the “most important development in psychoanalysis over the past decade … the growing recognition that intrapsychic phenomenon must be understood in the context of the larger interaction systems in which they take form” (p. 3).
Families constitute one of the prime examples of such a “larger interactional system.” The concept of the “intersubjective field—a system formed by the reciprocal interplay between two (or more) subjective worlds” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 4) usefully lends itself to an examination of family process. In this chapter I will offer some theoretical considerations in extending the intersubjective perspective to the study of family process and then discuss a case where the intersubjective approach facilitated a successful treatment of a 16-year-old boy.