IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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mentioned the term already in the context similar to its current usage were coming originally from the classical tradition and their writings on the subject became more known abroad than in the US at the time. Familiar with Lacan and Ricoeur because of his studies of the language of interpretation, Stanley Leavy, a student of Roy Schafer, contrary to the prevailing Classical position at the time, wrote (Leavy, 1973) that the basis of operations between patient and analyst is intersubjectivity and the model of the work is relationship. His argument is subtle and relies on the immersion of the analyst and the patient in the language and on the mutual and continuous interpretations. Another publication in North American psychoanalytic mainstream at the time was Arnold Modell ’s “Psychoanalysis in a New Context”, of 1984. Inspired by Andre Green and Donald Winnicott, Modell emphasized that psychoanalysis was primarily a matter of subjectivities, originally springing from baby-mother relational matrix . Later he elaborated on the interpretation of psychic life centering on the process of ‘ metaphorization ’: a translation of bodily experiences into metaphors, which is the symbolic function underlying all subjectivity . Usage of the term as a cornerstone of a theory , signaling a paradigmatic shift starts with Robert D. Stolorow’s, Bernard Brandchaft’s and George E. Atwood’s “ Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach ” (1987). Psychoanalysis is pictured here as “ a science of the intersubjective , focused on the interplay between the differently organized subjective worlds of the observer and the observed. The observational stance is always one within … the intersubjective field … ” (ibid, pp. 41-42). Here, the entire psychoanalytic framework is centered on the concept of the intersubjective field . Such an field is located at the point of intersection of the two subjectivities and is generated by the interplay between transference and countertransference. Moreover, in words of Stolorow: “The ( intersubjective) reality that crystalizes in the course of psychoanalytic treatment is not ‘recovered’ or ‘discovered’, as implied in Freud (1913), nor is it ‘created’ or ‘constructed’ as stated by others (Hartmann, 1939; Schafer, 1980; Spence, 1982). It is articulated through a process of empathic resonance. The intersubjective approach can integrate…experience-near insights obtained from such divergent viewpoints as classical conflict psychology and Kohut’s self psychology…” (Stolorow, 1988, p.337) Phenomenological inquiry led Stolorow and Atwood to the context-embeddedness of all emotional experience. This path from phenomenology to phenomenological contextualism mirrors that taken in the movement from Husserl’s still-Cartesian phenomenology to Heidegger’s phenomenological contextualism (Atwood, Stolorow and Orange, 2011). II. Bb. Some Pertinent Developments In Theory And Clinical Practice Within Socio- Historical-Political Complexity Of US Psychoanalysis, Leading to the Emergence of Intersubjectivity as a Psychoanalytic Orientation In US psychoanalysis , intersubjectivity can be viewed as a major shift of paradigm from at least three intertwining perspectives: a. from the perspective of psychoanalytic metapsychology there is a relative demotion of the dynamic unconscious and the drive concept

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