Robert D. Stolorow

An intersubjective view of self psychology

This article locates self psychology within the context of the evolving paradigm for psychoanalysis that the author calls intersubjectivity theory. It is argued that Kohut contributed significantly to the new paradigm but stopped short of fully embracing it. Self psychology and intersubjectivity theory are compared and contrasted, and an intersubjective view is offered of the patients transference, the analysts transference, and the system created by their reciprocal interaction.

Intersubjective-Systems Theory: A Phenomenological-Contextualist Psychoanalytic Perspective

In this article I outline the essentials of my phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective as it has been applied to a wide range of clinical phenomena, including development and pathogenesis, transference and resistance, forms of unconsciousness, emotional trauma, and therapeutic change. I characterize the therapeutic comportment entailed by these formulations as a kind of emotional dwelling.

From Drive to Affectivity: Contextualizing Psychological Life

It is the thesis of this article that the shift in psychoanalytic thinking from the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective systems. Unlike drives, which originate deep within the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind, affect—that is, subjective emotional experience—is something that from birth onward is regulated, or misregulated, within ongoing relational systems. Therefore, locating affect at the center automatically entails a radical contextualization of virtually all aspects of human psychological life.

Converting psychotherapy to psychoanalysis: A critique of the underlying assumptions

Etude critique des presupposes («mythes») qui soustendent la cure psychanalytique. Mise en relation de ces critiques avec le passage de la psychotherapie a la cure psychanalytique

Self‐disclosure from the perspective of intersubjectivity theory

Self-Disclosure from the Perspective Of Intersubjectivity Theory Donna M. Orange, Ph.D. and Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. In an earlier contribution (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow, 1997), we explained that the concept of practice better describes psychoanalytic clinical work than does the venerable notion of technique. We argued that although technique and technical rationality are appropriate in working with things without minds, where more variables can be controlled and experimentation can be replicated, practice and practical wisdom better suit work with human beings. It is no accident that people speak of the “practice” of law and medicine. The misapplication of the concept of technique in psychoanalysis is nowhere more evident than in discussions of self-disclosure. Only by conceiving of psychoanalysis primarily as an empirical science requiring rigid controls over intervening variables could we imagine that selfdisclosure could be regulated by rule or precept or even by “technical recommendation.” Nevertheless, generations of analytically oriented teachers and supervisors have sought to protect the process from contamination by insisting that analysts remain anonymous, just as workers at computer chip companies don white coveralls

Principles of dynamic systems, intersubjectivity, and the obsolete distinction between one‐person and two‐person psychologies

A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis by Lewis Aron (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1996)

Defense analysis in self psychology: A developmental view

This article illustrates the varying transference meanings of defense analysis as conceptualized from a self psychology perspective. A case presentation is offered demonstrating the changing meanings of the analysts defense interpretations resulting from the differing developmental contexts that organized the transference during the course of the analysis. It is emphasized that what the analyst interprets should be guided by an understanding of the primary developmental longings mobilized in the transference at any juncture.

Undergoing the Situation: Emotional Dwelling Is More Than Empathic Understanding

T raditional notions of therapeutic empathy have been pervaded by the Cartesian doctrine of the isolated mind. This doctrine bifurcates the subjective world of the person into outer and inner regions, reifies and absolutizes the resulting separation between the two, and pictures the mind as an objective entity that takes its place among other objects, a “thinking thing” that has an inside with contents and looks out on an external world from which it is essentially estranged. Within this metaphysical vision, human beings can encounter each other only as thinking subjects, and something like empathic immersion—what psychoanalytic innovator Heinz Kohut (1959) famously called vicarious introspection—is required to bridge the ontological gap separating their isolated minds from one another. In a post-Cartesian philosophical world, no such bridging is required, as we are all always already connected with one another in virtue of our common humanity (including our common finitude and existential vulnerability) and our co-disclosive relation to a common world. Kohut’s (1980) and others’ contention that a therapist’s empathic immersions can be neutral and objective is especially saturated with Cartesian assumptions. One isolated mind, the therapist, enters the subjective world of another isolated mind, the patient. With his or her own psychological world virtually left outside, the therapist gazes directly upon the patient’s inner experience with pure and preconceptionless eyes. From my vantage point, this doctrine of immaculate perception (Nietzsche, 1892) entails a denial of

The Contextuality and Existentiality of Emotional Trauma

In this article I chronicle the emergence of two interrelated themes that crystallized in my investigations of emotional trauma during the more than 16 years that followed my own experience of traumatic loss. One pertains to the context-embeddedness of emotional trauma and the other to the claim that the possibility of emotional trauma is built into our existential constitution. I find a reconciliation and synthesis of these two themes—traumas contextuality and its existentiality—in the recognition of the bonds of deep emotional attunement we can form with one another in virtue of our common finitude.

Autobiographical Reflections on the Intersubjective History of an Intersubjective Perspective in Psychoanalysis

This article traces the evolution of the authors intersubjective perspective by chronicling four decades of formative relationships that contributed to its creation.