Chapter 2 The Many Meanings of Intersubjectivity and Their Implications for Analyst Self-Expression and Self-Disclosure

Probably not since Freud and Ferenczi parted ways because of their disagreement over Ferenczi's experiments with mutual analysis, have questions surrounding psychoanalytic intersubjectivity been as passionately debated as they are today. The controversy concerning whether psychoanalysis is better understood and practiced as a one- or a two-person process has been kept alive in various ways through the writings of Reich, Sullivan, Balint, Searles, Racker, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Winnicott, and others. But as interesting and important as these earlier contributions have been, the contemporary debate is so richly varied in its elements that I shall have to forego tracing its historical precedents in order simply to outline what today's authors mean by intersubjectivity and to explore how they see it as shaping either development or the analytic situation.

Current tensions center on divergent clinical recommendations devolving from multiple theories of intersubjectivity, with disagreements often centering on the quality and extent of the analyst's self-expression and self-disclosure. For instance, while both self psychology and relational theory recognize the analyst's subjectivity and neither theory