Intersubjective-systems theory, the name of the post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective that my collaborators and I have developed over the course of some four decades, is a phenomenological contextualism.
It is phenomenological in that it investigates and illuminates worlds of emotional experience and the structures that organize them. It is contextual in that it holds that such structures take form, both developmentally and in the psychoanalytic situation, in constitutive intersubjective contexts. Developmentally, recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system give rise to principles (thematic patterns, meaning-structures) that unconsciously organize subsequent emotional and relational experiences. Such organizing principles are unconscious, not in the sense of being repressed but in being prereflective; they ordinarily do not enter the domain of reflective self-awareness.
These intersubjectively derived, prereflective organizing principles are the basic building blocks of personality development, and their totality constitutes one's character. They show up in the psychoanalytic situation in the form of transference, which intersubjective-systems theory conceptualizes as unconscious organizing activity. The patient's transference experience is co-constituted by the patient's prereflective organizing principles and whatever is coming from the analyst that is lending itself to being organized by them.
A parallel statement can be made about the analyst's transference. The psychological field formed by the interplay of the patient's transference and the analyst's transference is an example of what we call an intersubjective system. Psychoanalysis is a dialogical method for bringing this prereflective organizing activity into reflective self-awareness.
Such organizing principles include, importantly, those that dictate what emotional experiences must be prevented from coming into full being—that is, those that must be dynamically repressed—because they are prohibited or too dangerous. Intersubjective-systems theory emphasizes that all such forms of unconsciousness are constituted in relational contexts. Indeed, from an intersubjective-systems perspective, all of the clinical phenomena with which psychoanalysis has been traditionally concerned are seen as taking form within systems of interacting, differently organized, mutually influencing emotional worlds.
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., is a founding faculty member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Harvard and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Riverside .
Phenomenology led us inexorably to contextualism.
Intersubjective-systems theory gives an account of therapeutic action in which insight through interpretation and the affective bond with the analyst are seen to form an irreducible unity. Interpretive expansion of the patient's capacity for reflective awareness of old, repetitive organizing principles occurs concomitantly with the affective impact and meanings of ongoing relational experiences with the analyst, and both are indissoluble components of a unitary therapeutic process that establishes the possibility of alternative principles for organizing experience, whereby the patient's emotional horizons can become widened, enriched, more flexible, and more complex. As the tight grip of old organizing principles becomes loosened, as emotional experiencing thereby expands and becomes increasingly nameable within a context of human understanding, and as what one feels becomes seamlessly woven into the fabric of whom one essentially is, there is an enhancement of one's very sense of being. That, to my mind, is the essence of therapeutic change.