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view of psychoanalytic process, was elaborated by some contemporary Ego psychologists (below). The two person approach sees the analyst as less of a knowing authority, as it questions the primacy of deep unconscious drives and fantasies. The analyst isn’t viewed as the he or she who knows the content and working of the unconscious mind of the patient. At most, the analyst shares with the patient a mind that has unconscious aspects but both are in effect subject to its unknown quality. The more egalitarian analyst is open to considering the patient’s attributions to him as not merely transference but worthy of considering from the patient’s point of view. The analyst acknowledges that he is influenced by the patient and that the patient in turn is influenced by him and may even be responding to suggestion rather than to a true perception of him or herself. Since the analyst working within the paradigm of intersubjectivity isn’t convinced that the patient is always dealing with experiences which can be explained by particular pre- conceived metapsychological conceptualizations, he has openness to acknowledging that he, himself, is hardly free from his own subjectivity. As Owen Renik (1993) put it, the analyst himself has to deal with his own irreducible subjectivity . In Renik’s opinion, the analyst is always interpreting from the perspective of his own experience-generated beliefs rather than that of the patient. The merging of two subjectivities, that of the patient and that of the analyst, becomes the functional definition of intersubjectivity. Influence, interaction and the emergence of something that is an amalgam of both, becomes the hallmark of such an approach. Consequently, focus on intersubjectivity requires of the analyst an acknowledgement that he or she is participating in a “ field” of two individual subjectivities. Following the intersubjective relational turn this can be seen as having differing manifestations. The idea of the co-mingling of two unconscious minds may appeal more to traditionally inclined analysts. On the other hand, within any version of psychoanalysis that is based upon interactional- relational thinking in a two person context, the use of an intersubjective approach, while not ahistorical, rests on dynamic clinical phenomenology, and consequently stresses the importance of the here and now experience of the relationship between analyst and patient with considerable reservation about metapsychology of an omnipotent and omnipresent unconscious. The intersubjective and relational dimensions of the psychoanalytic situation and process have been gradually incorporated by many contemporary Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysts, (e.g. Theodore Jacobs, Nancy Chodorow, Steve Ellman, James Grotstein, Lawrence Brown and many others) in variety of ways, giving rise to some hybrid conceptualizations and orientations, some of which will be noted below.
II. Bc. Socio-Historical Context in French Canadian Intersubjective Thought French speaking psychoanalysis includes North American (Québec) French speaking analysis. Given the close connections between North American French psychoanalysis and
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