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Peter: The first question I wanted to ask is for readers who might not be familiar with your previous work. Would you describe what led you to write Worlds of Experience with George Atwood and Donna Orange and how it builds on your previous work.
Bob: Well, we've been developing a perspective in psychoanalysis that we now call intersubjective systems theory, for nearly three decades. The first article in which we use the phrase “intersubjective perspective” was written in 1976 and published in 1978. First, we've been developing the intersubjective perspective as a clinical theory, looking at all the basic clinical phenomena that occur in psychoanalytic treatment as occurring at the interface of the interacting experiential worlds of patient and analyst. Second, we have been rethinking some of the basic theoretical pillars of psychoanalytic theory. The present book was primarily directed at looking at the philosophical foundations of our perspective. We contrast those with the philosophical foundations of traditional psychoanalytic theory and practice and then try to demonstrate that the differing philosophical foundations make a huge clinical difference. That was the basic idea. To elaborate a little more, we came to the conclusion that traditional psychoanalytic theory and practice along with some contemporary approaches like self psychology and relational psychoanalysis have very powerful roots in Descartes's philosophy of the isolated mind. One way of looking at the philosophical foundations of our intersubjective perspective is that it's an attempt to ground intersubjective systems theory and practice in a post-Cartesian, or maybe more
accurately, a non-Cartesian philosophy of mind, which we refer to with various terms, such as intersubjective systems theory or more broadly as a kind of psychoanalytic contextualism. The basic idea is that personal experience always takes form in a context of interrelatedness.
Peter: It seems like a way of thinking that lends its