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Intersubjectivity theory is an evolving body of knowledge, the central focus of which is the psychology of human subjectivity. Unlike Freudian theory, which has its roots in the medical sciences and takes as its object of study the interaction of mental and biological processes within the mind of the individual, intersubjectivity theory concerns itself with the field created by the interplay of worlds of subjective experience and personal meanings.

Focusing as it does on the patient’s patterns of construing and making sense of his personal world, intersubjectivity theory attends to subjective experience. The therapist informed by intersubjectivity theory does not necessarily listen for personality structures associated with psychosexual stages of development, for derivatives of drives or conflicts, or for unconscious motives, defenses, or resistance. Through the intersubjective lens, patients are not viewed as trying to hide or dress themselves up. Rather, their presentations are seen as dynamic solutions to the universal problems of managing affect within their individual developmental contexts. By appreciating this adaptive solution and the complex system from which it emerged, the striving for health rather than the pathology of the patient’s experience is affirmed. When the therapist responds from this perspective, the patient can feel more real to himself and more trusting in his perceptions and his own experience.

Before we can explore intersubjectivity, the complex field that is created when two or more individuals with their unique subjectivities come together, we must first examine the nature of human subjectivity. Intersubjectivity theory assumes that one’s experience of oneself and the world is the fundamental focus of psychoanalytic inquiry. This assertion means that the personal ways in which we have come to view and experience ourselves, both privately, within our skin, and as we move about among others, are all that can be understood through the psychoanalytic dialogue. As straightforward as this statement seems, it is the basis for a theoretical revolution in psychoanalysis. No longer are universal assumptions about developmental imperatives and crises imposed on the patient’s unfolding story. Gone is the belief that the therapist holds a privileged, objectively “true” perspective on the reality and meaning of the patient’s experience. Rather, the overarching psychological construct is the validity and reality of the patient’s perspective, his subjective experience.

Human subjectivity becomes organized into patterns based on repeated emotional experience within the child-caregiver dyad. The creation of such patterns, irreducibly embedded in the emotional quality of formative life experience with parents and caregivers, constitutes the sense of subjective experience (Orange et al. 1997). Such patterns are the scaffold on which the coherence and continuity of experience depend. Because this structure is considered essential to psychological functioning, Stolorow and colleagues (1994a) have included it in their understanding of an important source of human motivation. As they observe, “The need to maintain the organization of experience is a central motive in the patterning of human action” (p. 35).

Human infants require sensitive care by others who take pleasure in their health, comfort, and well-being. Ideally, a system develops in which both infant and caregiver expect that the needs of the child will be met in ways that are satisfying to both. However, whatever quality of care is given, the developing child organizes those patterns of experience into expectations for the future. Without generating expectancies, experience is random and unmanageable, and every new circumstance would require new learning. Part of human adaptation involves the ability to organize experience into meaningful patterns. These patterns, or organizations of experience, contribute to the essence of subjectivity and the sense of a cohesive self.

Intersubjectivity theory recognizes that the therapist’s understanding of the patient’s experience is inescapably circumscribed by the therapist’s own subjectivity. Therefore, while striving to comprehend the patient’s view of the world through the patient’s eyes, the therapist must be tentative and nonauthoritarian regarding what she believes she understands about the patient’s subjective reality. By holding this perspective of fallibility, the therapist facilitates the opportunity for expanding the subjectivities of both patient and therapist. That is, the potential for new patterns to emerge exists for both the therapist and the patient, and these new patterns may develop in the organizations of their subjective experience when their archaically formed (that is, formed during childhood) organizing principles are disconfirmed in the treatment relationship.

Making subjective experience and its construction in intersubjective contexts central to the theory of personality and treatment is what distinguishes intersubjectivity theory from other psychoanalytic theories. In traditional psychoanalytic theory, the focus of attention is on the intrapsychic life of the individual. Psychological phenomena are understood in terms of the interaction and conflict between the three mental structures: id, ego, and superego. According to Brenner (1982), one of the leading theorists of the modern Freudian tradition, “The fabric of psychic life as we know it is woven of drive derivatives, of anxiety and depressive affect, of defense, and of superego manifestations” (p. 252). He then goes on to make this global yet questionable statement: “Compromise formations arising from psychic conflict comprise virtually all of psychic life which is of emotional significance to us” (p. 252). This kind of thinking illustrates what Stolorow and Atwood (1992) refer to as “the myth of the isolated mind” (p. 7).

The myth of the isolated mind portrays the human mind as existing independently from the physical world and the world of others. For psychoanalysis, the myth of the isolated mind finds its expression in Freud’s view of the mind as a “mental apparatus,” a drive-discharge, tension-reducing machine. In ego psychology, the myth of the isolated mind is expressed in the value placed on the achievement of separation and autonomous mental functioning. The notion of the isolated mind not only finds expression in metapsychology but is also deeply embedded in psychoanalytic technique. The traditional concepts of neutrality, abstinence, the purity of the transference field, the focus on regression, the idea that associations can be free, and the conviction that transference must be resolved before termination are examples of the way that a fundamental assumption about the isolated mind can infuse and influence psychoanalytic practice. The unexamined acceptance of isolated mind notions even underlies education and training in psychoanalysis. It was once a common practice at institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association to assign candidates in training to their training analysts. The myth of the isolated mind can readily be seen behind this practice—the assumption that analysts are interchangeable and that any skillful analyst can serve as the opaque screen onto which patients can displace and project their inner life. In this earlier theory, the notion was that the major function of the relationship between patient and analyst was to establish the working alliance. Relationship became a technique to be employed by one isolated mind upon another.

Much of post-Freudian theorizing has been, in one form or another, an effort to counteract this isolated mind construct. Winnicott’s (1965) famous dictum that there is no such thing as a baby without a mother and Sullivan’s (1964) similar idea, “Personality is made manifest in interpersonal situations, and not otherwise” (p. 32), are examples of early formulations of the relational nature of the mind. The characterizations of traditional psychoanalytic treatment as “one-person” in contrast to the “two-person” view of modern relational thinking and the systems view of intersubjectivity theory have been ways that this paradigm shift has been conceptualized. Expanding on this multiperson direction in theory, Stolorow and Atwood (1992) state, “The concept of an intersubjective system brings to focus both the individual’s world of inner experience and its embeddedness with other such worlds in a continual flow of reciprocal mutual influence” (p. 18).

For intersubjectivity theory, then, psychological phenomena form, not in the isolated mind of the individual, but in an intersubjective context. This intersubjective context refers to the reciprocal experiences of mutual influence between two or more subjectivities. When two or more people come together in relationship, for instance the child and the caregivers or the patient and therapist, each brings his or her own world of subjective experience to the interaction. Together, they create a field, or a dynamic system, that contributes to the subjective experience of the other. Intersubjectivity theory takes as its domain of inquiry the field created by the interplay of these subjectivities. Thus, broadly speaking, intersubjectivity theory is a dynamic systems theory.

Beebe and Lachmann (1998) address the organization of a dyad in a systems paradigm, first by examining mother-infant interactions and then generalizing these findings to the therapy situation. According to their formulation, “A theory of interaction must specify how each person is affected both by his own behavior, that is self-regulation, as well as by the partner’s behavior, that is interactive (mutual) regulation. Each person must both monitor the partner and regulate the inner state” (p. 482). Self-regulation refers to the person’s capacity to regulate or control internal states, such as affectivity, arousal, or responsiveness. Interactive or mutual regulation refers to the extent in which each person influences the other, though not necessarily to the same degree (what Aron [1996] has described as mutual but not symmetrical). The significant point is that, for infants and adults, the way one self-regulates will impact the other, which will have a reciprocal impact on the experience of self. Infant research has demonstrated remarkable examples of mutual influence. In one study of electroencephalogram patterns of ten-month-old infants shown a video of a laughing or crying actress, the infants’ brains were positively or negatively activated in correspondence to the affect on screen (Davidson and Fox 1982). This phenomenon of matching affective patterns holds true for adults as well: perceiving the affective state of the other produces a similar state in oneself. As Beebe and Lachmann (1998) put it, “As two partners match each other’s affective patterns, each recreates in himself a psychophysiological state similar to that of the partner, thus participating in the subjective state of the other” (p. 490). This capacity for two people to match and mutually influence each other’s internal affect states has important implications for the role of empathy in psychotherapeutic treatment.

In individual psychotherapy, the system encompasses the field created by the coming together of the subjective worlds of the patient and the therapist. While it is impossible to identify all components of the system, since each system is unique, some of the likely shared components include the personal worlds of subjective experience of both, the situational and cultural contexts that encompass the system, and the interacting organizations of experience. Not surprisingly, the psychoanalytic theory of the therapist, with its assumptions and inferences, is an integral part of the context and impinges on the overall system. We will develop this further at a later point.

Individual therapy can be considered a dynamic dyadic system, and a very complex one at that. The variables that might affect the system are too numerous and their interaction too complicated to thoroughly specify. Think of a pool table, where the path of the cue ball will be deflected by even minor contact with any other ball. Now imagine how such obvious variables as the age, gender, religion, race, and attractiveness of one might affect the subjective experience of the other. Given our exquisite sensitivity to the influence of others, we suggest that the powerful intersubjective field created in psychotherapy is a context in which both participants will inevitably be influenced and changed.

It is important always to bear in mind that while we stress subjective experience, such subjective experience is continually being constructed in the present out of the past experience of the individual and the current context in which she finds herself. “One’s personal reality is always codetermined by features of the surround and the unique meanings into which these are assimilated” (Stolorow and Atwood 1992, p. 21). For instance, if the patient’s experience while growing up was of an aloof, demanding, and critical father, then this particular set of experiences will contribute to shaping her view of herself and her expectations of relationships with others in the present. Furthermore, the specific ways in which the events, affects, and bodily sensations associated with these experiences of “father” came to be organized and understood in their original context will contribute to the highly specific subjective meaning of new “father-like” contexts in the present.

Note that in the preceding paragraph we referred to the patient’s experience of the father, rather than to what the father “actually was.” The reason for this semantic distinction is that, from the intersubjective perspective, the tools of psychoanalytic psychotherapy do not permit us to know another’s reality in any objective sense. We cannot know how the father really was with his daughter; we can only know the daughter’s subjective experience of her father as she communicates it to the therapist today. This has on occasion been misunderstood as implying that intersubjectivity theory holds that there is no objective reality (Kriegman 1998). This is certainly not the case. What intersubjectivity theory maintains is that objective reality is not knowable or accessible through utilizing the empathic-introspective stance of psychoanalytic psychotherapy (Stolorow 1998). One can learn all about the physical reality of a crème brûlée by applying the principles and experimental techniques of physics and chemistry to analyzing its composition. But another person’s experience of the crème brûlée can be understood only from a report of her subjective experience of it. It was too rich, too sweet, and too thin for her taste. Others might experience it differently. As therapists, we can never know what our patient’s father was really like. After all, our patient’s older brother, mother, and dog might have experienced him differently. Thus, all that is knowable in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and therefore its principal domain of inquiry, is subjective experience—the subjective experience of the patient and that of the therapist and the intersubjective field created at the interface of these subjectivities.

The intersubjective emphasis on subjective experience is in contrast to the traditional psychoanalytic position that the therapist, by virtue of her vantage point and her training, has a uniquely objective view of the patient’s experience. Such an objectivist stance assumes that the therapist can make observations about the patient’s experience that are not colored by the therapist’s own unconscious organizing principles (Orange et al. 1997). For the intersubjective theorist, all human experience is embedded in relational systems. One cannot escape the emotional impact of the person of the therapist on the relationship with the patient. The therapist’s own unconscious organization of experience, as well as her theory of mind, must color her perceptions of and reactions to the patient. When the patient says that the crème brûlée is too sweet, all the therapist can know is what “too sweet” means to her. Therefore, each patient-therapist pair is unique, formed within the intersubjective field created by the coming together of their two unique subjectivities. The interfacing subjectivities converge around the idea of “too sweet,” although neither knows exactly what “too sweet” tastes like to the other. It follows that the course of any treatment will be unique to the specific pair engaged in the process.