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By putting Freud’s instinct theory and ego psychology together, Loewald’s work can be seen as building a vital bridge between a “one-person psychology” and a “two-person object relations psychology” (See also separate EGO PSYCHOLOGY and OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES entries). Responding to the critics on both sides – those who view this hybrid integrative orientation as focused too much or too little on the unconscious and the drives – Chodorow (2004) elaborates how intersubjective ego psychologists follow Loewald’s concern with the analyst’s unconscious and its effects on the clinical process; and they find the unconscious in Erikson’s attention to anxieties and defenses and his elaborately and empathetically described processes of symptom formation in children. In her view, it is precisely because psychoanalysis begins from a recognition of the unique subjectivity created in each individual by unconscious affects, drives, fantasies, conflicts, compromise formations, and a personal dynamic history, along with a recognition that two subjects bring their uniqueness to the transference- countertransference analytic field, that they also create, in a particular cultural and analytic environment, that intersubjective ego psychology – the American fusion of ego psychology and relational psychoanalysis – continues to grow. In this context, Elliot Adler and Janet Bachant (1996) re-examine an essential foundation of classical technique, the psychoanalytic situation, defining it in terms of basic elements of psychoanalytic relatedness, which make the in depth exploration of human motivation possible. Psychoanalytic situation is viewed here as an “extraordinary interpersonal arrangement, anchored by two clearly differentiated yet complementary ways of relating: free association and analytic neutrality” (Adler and Bachant, 1996, p. 1021). Described as one pole of ‘reciprocal role requirements’, free association is viewed as a prerequisite of expressive freedom to have an introspective encounter with their deepest emotional stirrings in the context of an interaction with another person (ibid, p. 1025; original italics) . As an interpretive tool, it is viewed as outweighing even the resources of theoretical knowledge. Analytic role is viewed as complementary to that of the patient. It serves a function of protecting the patient’s expressive freedom. In this way, psychoanalytic situation and technique is casted as a two- person process of analytic exploration of one-person neurosis: “ one-neurosis, not a one-person model of analytic treatment” (ibid., p. 1038). Among areas of interest to contemporary Freudian psychoanalysts, which are relevant to intersubjectivity, are unconscious sharing of ‘states of consciousness’ (Libbey, 2011), bi- directional unconscious influences and the inter-psychic realm (McLaughlin, 2005), further studies of the field created by patient and analyst, based on Ogden (1994) and W. Baranger and M. Baranger (2008), enactment (Ellman and Moskowitz 1998, 2008) and ‘enaction’ (Reis, 2009), and others.
III. Acb. Intersubjectivity in North American post-Kleinian and post-Bionian Thought Extending and reinterpreting Bion, additionally absorbing thoughts of some Latin American and Italian authors, James Grotstein (1985, 1999, 2005) has developed an
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