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Intersubjectivity may be usefully seen in contrast with intrapsychic dimensions of experience. The intrapsychic has historically referred to a one person system, describing the internal conscious and unconscious experience of an individual. The interpersonal or relational, set up antiphonally to the intrapsychic, is a concept applied to the following Conceptual Elements (of Intersubjectivity): a) The social dimension of individual experience; b) The bi-personal field imagined as unconscious, preconscious and conscious; c) Experience shared interpersonally or collectively; d) Experiences individual or dyadic/multiple that emerge with the unique characteristics of a melded, contextualized setting; e) The constitutive effect of the intrusion of ‘otherness’ into the individual, an ‘other’ as III. Aba. Historical Roots Different analytic schools draw the historic genealogy for intersubjectivity differently. From the relational perspective, Sullivan is certainly important and the work of Racker as well as British Independent and Kleinian analysts as filtered through the interpersonal school. Ferenczi is also an important figure in the evolution of this tradition, inaugurating a concern and interest in the impact of external relationships as a complement to constitutional, and internal world developments that were emphasized in the classical tradition out of which Ferenczi’s work emerged. Ferenczi’s concern with trauma, its reality base and psychic sequelae stimulated renewed interest in the intersubjective field as a site of psychic labor and transformative work. large as the state and as microscopic as a shared state change f) Clinical implications of intersubjectivity, e.g. Enactments. Sándor Ferenczi Ferenczi’s work (Ferenczi, 1949; Dupont, 1988) has been an important influence on the development of theories that emphasize intersubjective dimensions of psychoanalytic work, including his emphasis on mutuality, enactment, and the bi-directionality of psychic processes (Bass, 2015, 2009; Aron and Harris, 2010). His brief experiment in mutual analysis itself, as described in his clinical diary (1988) is the most radical representation of a fully intersubjective therapy in our history. Ferenczi has been a common ancestor to two groups: the British Independent Group (Parsons, 2009) and the American Relational Group (Bass, 2009), which have played an important role in the application of intersubjective ideas to psychoanalysis. Access to the clinical diary (Dupont, 1988) and the Freud/Ferenczi correspondence that followed revealed a common sensibility deeply embedded in the history of psychoanalytic ideas. Ferenczi’s ideas about the analytic relationship—the analyst as a real person (a subject)
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