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2013). Relational psychoanalysis has emphasized mutual dimensions of psychoanalytic process, and while distinguishing between aspects of mutuality as fundamental to the process (Dupont, 1988) and the asymmetries inherent in psychoanalytic process ( Lewis Aron , Irwin Hoffman ), other authors (Bass, 2001, 2007) have emphasized complementarities that obtain between the analysts’ and patients’ psychic contributions to the process, beyond the conscious role identifications and responsibilities that guide analysts and patients in different ways. Modern psychoanalysts drawing on intersubjective concepts of subjectivity and analytic process mix and match and make many variable and comparable theoretical entities. Some are more interested in the force of the socio-political; some elaborate the implications of the intersubjective for technique, some for metapsychology. While there are differences and overlaps among these approaches, intersubjectivity is perhaps somewhat unique or at least unusual in psychoanalytic concepts in that the term and its extensions and meanings are changing and evolving quite intensively. Recently, the term intrasubjective has emerged, a term intended to capture the double experience of between and within.
III. Ac. Examples of Hybrid-Integrative Perspectives in The USA
III. Aca. North American Intersubjective Ego Psychology A uniquely North American/US ‘Independent Tradition’ of Intersubjective Ego Psychology is described by Nancy Chodorow (2004) as holding in tension and reconciling two contradictory psychoanalytic approaches – ego psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis, established by founding American theorists Hartmann and Sullivan. The contemporary Intersubjective Ego Psychology incorporates both – a focus on intrapsychic conflict, compromise formation, an internal world and intrapsychic fantasy, yet the psyche (of both the patient and the analyst) is also interpersonally and culturally created; transference is a history driven repetition, which analyst interprets to the patient, yet not everything what goes on between the patient and the analyst comes from the patient and patient may also be the interpreter of the analyst’s experience or affect the analyst’s countertransference, and both participants can co-create analytic field, which is, in some sense, more than the sum of the two- person parts. Intersubjective ego psychologists hold both perspectives at the same time and thereby modify each. The contemporary intersubjective ego psychologist Warren Poland (1996) expresses such hybrid integration in following words: “How can it be that no man is an island and that at the same time every man is an island? … It is misleading to speak glibly of one-person psychology versus two-person psychology. No single person exists outside a human, object- connected field; the analytic space colors how such a single person comes to understanding by the other and to insight. At the same time, the mind of any individual can be engaged by another yet is always crucially apart, a private universe of inner experience” [Poland, 1996, p. 33].
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