This article was downloaded by: [Universidad de Sevilla]

On: 21 October 2014, At: 02:44

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A
Topical Journal for Mental
Health Professionals
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsi20

Autobiographical Reflections on
the Intersubjective History of
an Intersubjective Perspective
in Psychoanalysis
a b
Robert D. Stolorow Ph.D.
a
Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis , Los
Angeles
b
Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of
Subjectivity , New York City
Published online: 01 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Robert D. Stolorow Ph.D. (2004) Autobiographical Reflections

on the Intersubjective History of an Intersubjective Perspective in Psychoanalysis,
Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 24:4,
542-557, DOI: 10.1080/07351692409349101

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07351692409349101

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,
or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views
expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the
Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with
 primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the
Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,
sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014
 Autobiographical Reflections
on the Intersubjective History of an
Intersubjective Perspective in
Psychoanalysis
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

R O B E R T D . S T O L O R O W , PH .D.

This article traces the evolution of the author’s intersubjective per-

spective by chronicling four decades of formative relationships that
contributed to its creation.

M Y DEVELOPMENT AS A PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORETICIAN AND

practitioner is coextensive with the evolution of a psychoana-
lytic perspective that I have come to call intersubjective systems the-
ory. True to this perspective, the history of its evolution that follows
is in large part a history of formative relationships—with teachers,
with mentors, and, especially important, with treasured collabora-
tors. (An important omission here is the profound impact of my rela-
tionships with patients.)
The intellectual roots of my psychoanalytic perspective go back to
the period of my doctoral studies in clinical psychology at Harvard,
from 1965 to 1970. During that period, Harvard was a wonderful
place for a clinical psychologist to grow up in intellectually. The

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. is Founding Faculty Member and Training and

Supervising Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles;
Founding Faculty Member, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectiv-
ity, New York City.
542
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 543

clinical psychology program was actually not part of a psychology

department. It was set in the Department of Social Relations, which
had been formed by leading scholars from four disciplines—sociol-
ogy, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and personality psy-
chology—all of whom had a common interest and background in
psychoanalysis. Thus, instead of studying the experimental psychol-
ogy of rats, I had the privilege of learning about social systems theory
from Talcott Parsons, culture and personality from John Whiting, and
epigenesis and identity formation from Erik Erikson.
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

The clinical psychology program at Harvard was the first and last
stronghold of a tradition in academic personality psychology known
as personology. This tradition, founded by Henry Murray at the Har-
vard Psychological Clinic in the 1930s, held as its basic premise the
claim that knowledge of human personality can be advanced only by
the systematic, in-depth study of the individual person. This empha-
sis on “idiographic,” rather than “nomothetic,” research was a radical
departure from the philosophy of science that then dominated, and
has continued to dominate, academic psychology in the United
States. Murray’s personology attracted a group of exceptionally cre-
ative students, many of whom contributed to his magnum opus, Ex-
plorations in Personality (Murray, 1938), a classic in the field of
personality psychology. Two of Murray’s most influential followers
were Robert White and Silvan Tomkins.1
My two principal mentors during my doctoral studies were White
and Irving Alexander, a visiting professor and protégé of Tomkins.
From White I took seminars on Freudian and neo-Freudian theory
and the study of lives and acquired an abiding interest in understand-
ing the uniqueness of each individual’s world of experience. Alexan-
der taught us psychological assessment the way he had learned it
from Tomkins. Instead of preparing us to do psychological testing in
hospitals, his course consisted in studying one person for the entire

1
To psychoanalysts, White is best known for his theory of effectance motivation
and Tomkins for his influential contributions to affect theory (an emphasis that be-
came central in intersubjective systems theory). Less well known is that they were
both major contributors to the personological movement in academic personality
psychology. The history of the personological movement at Harvard is chronicled
in White’s (1987) privately published A Memoir. It was my studies with White that
led to my first published article on psychoanalytic theory (Stolorow, 1969).
 544 ROBERT D. STOLOROW

year by means of a variety of methods (analysis of autobiographical

material, in-depth interviews, projective tests, etc.). The emphasis
again was on systematically investigating the unique psychological
world of the individual.
Unfortunately, White’s retirement in 1968 was a virtual death-
blow for personology at Harvard, but attempts were made to revive
the tradition in other settings. Before chronicling one such attempt, I
must first make note of the impact of my psychoanalytic training.
I pursued my formal psychoanalytic training from 1970 to 1974
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

at the psychoanalytic institute of the Postgraduate Center for Men-

tal Health in New York City, one of the few psychoanalytic insti-
tutes in the United States that at that time offered full training to
psychologists and social workers along with psychiatrists. From the
start, I was unhappy with the slow pace and lack of intellectual rigor
of the didactic coursework, and I studied a great deal on my own. For
example, during my first year I undertook a close reading of Freud’s
complete works, excluding those in applied psychoanalysis and his
pre–Studies-in-Hysteria papers. The dominant theoretical orienta-
tion at the institute was Freudian ego psychology, and I eagerly de-
voured the writings of such authors as Anna Freud, Hartmann,
Mahler, Jacobson, Loewald, Sandler, Kernberg, Rapaport, Schafer,
G. Klein, and Gill, along with a smattering of Horney, Fairbairn,
and Winnicott.
During my first year of candidacy, I took a course from Frank
Lachmann, who, the following year, became the supervisor of one of
my analytic cases. Frank was far and away my best teacher and super-
visor, showing a remarkable capacity to draw out the implications of
differing theoretical ideas for the specific framing of analytic inter-
ventions. In his course, he introduced Kohut’s (1966, 1968) early
clinical papers on narcissism and the treatment of narcissistic person-
ality disorders—contributions that left a lasting imprint on my clini-
cal sensibility. A group of disgruntled candidates, including myself
and my good friends James Fosshage and Peter Buirsky, dissatisfied
with the coursework at the institute, engaged Frank to lead a private
study group, which focused for two years on psychoanalytic readings
on narcissism and masochism. As a direct result of participating in
that study group, I wrote and published my first two major psychoan-
alytic articles, “Toward a Functional Definition of Narcissism”
(Stolorow, 1975b) and “The Narcissistic Function of Masochism
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 545

(and Sadism)” (Stolorow, 1975a). My effort in these articles was to

free Kohut’s pathbreaking insights into the phenomenology of nar-
cissism and narcissistic disturbance from their embeddedness in the
mechanistic assumptions of classical drive theory. Frank and I soon
began collaborating on a series of clinical papers on the “develop-
mental prestages of defense,” and these, together with my articles on
narcissism, were collected in our book Psychoanalysis of Develop-
mental Arrests (Stolorow and Lachmann, 1980), a book that, along
with a later article (Stolorow and Lachmann, 1984/1985) redefining
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

transference as unconscious organizing activity, established us both

as clinical theoreticians.
I return now to the influence on my psychoanalytic development
of Murray’s personology. An attempt to revive the personological
tradition occurred in 1972. While still a candidate, I became inter-
ested in pursuing an academic career in psychology and learned of a
position opening at Rutgers, where Tomkins and George Atwood,
who had been deeply influenced by Tomkins, were on the psychol-
ogy faculty. I recall a phone conversation in which Tomkins urged
me to come to Rutgers because, as he put it, with me on the faculty
there would he a “critical mass” for the creation of a program in
personology. I did join the faculty at Rutgers, but, despite several
meetings devoted to planning a new personologically oriented doc-
toral program in personality psychology, it never got off the ground.
The one concrete result of these efforts, a highly significant one for
me, was a series of collaborative studies, first by Atwood and
Tomkins and then by Atwood and me.
Atwood and Tomkins (1976) wrote a pivotal article, “On the Sub-
jectivity of Personality Theory,” which was published in a rather
obscure periodical, The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sci-
ences. The basic premise of this article, which the authors viewed as a
contribution to the psychology of knowledge, was that every psycho-
logical theory has roots in the psychological life of the theorist and
that the science of personality psychology “can achieve a greater de-
gree of consensus and generality only if it begins to turn back on itself
and question its own psychological foundations” (p. 166).
George soon became established as my soul-brother, my closest
friend and collaborator, which he has remained. In the early and
mid-1970s, after writing a first brief, joint article on messianic salva-
tion fantasies (Stolorow and Atwood, 1973), we embarked on a series
 546 ROBERT D. STOLOROW

of psychobiographical studies of the personal, subjective origins of

the theoretical systems of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank—studies
that formed the basis of our first book, Faces in a Cloud 2: Subjectiv-
ity in Personality Theory (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979), which was
completed in 1976. From these studies we concluded that, because
psychological theories derive to a significant degree from the sub-
jective concerns of their creators, what psychoanalysis and person-
ality psychology needed was a theory of subjectivity itself—a
unifying framework capable of accounting not only for the psycho-
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

logical phenomena that other theories address but also for the theo-
ries themselves.
In the last chapter of Faces, we outlined a set of proposals for the
creation of such a framework, which we called psychoanalytic phe-
nomenology, a term that never caught on. Influenced by the writings
of G. Klein (1976) and Schafer (1976), we envisioned this framework
as a depth psychology of personal experience, purified of the mecha-
nistic reifications of Freudian metapsychology. Our framework took
the subjective “representational world”3 (Sandler and Rosenblatt,
1962) of the individual as its central theoretical construct. We as-
sumed no impersonal psychical agencies or motivational prime mov-
ers in order to explain the representational world. Instead, we
assumed that this world evolves organically from the person’s en-
counter with the critical formative experiences that constitute his or
her unique life history. Once established, it becomes discernible in
the distinctive, recurrent patterns, themes, and invariant meanings
that prereflectively organize the person’s experiences. Psychoana-
lytic phenomenology entailed a set of interpretive principles for in-
vestigating the nature, origins, purposes, and transformations of the

2
This title derived from a passage written by Murray (1938). In the passage,
which became our book’s epigraph, he compared psychologists of differing theoret-
ical persuasions with people seeing different faces in the same cloud formation, de-
pending on their initial biases of perception.
3
Later, we (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984) dropped the term representational
world because incisive questioning by our students helped us become aware that it
was being used to refer both to imagistic contents of experience and to the thematic
structuring of experience. Hence, we decided to use subjective world when describ-
ing experiential contents and structures of subjectivity to designate the invariant
principles prereflectively organizing those contents along particular thematic lines.
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 547

configurations of self and other pervading a person’s subjective

universe (see, e.g., Stolorow, 1978a, 1979; Atwood and Stolorow,
1980, 1981, 1984; Stolorow and Atwood, 1982, 1984).
Although the concept of intersubjectivity was not introduced in
the first edition of Faces, it was clearly implicit in the demonstrations
of how the personal, subjective world of a personality theorist influ-
ences his or her understanding of other persons’ experiences (a sec-
tion in the introductory chapter is subtitled “The Observer Is the
Observed”). The first explicit use of the term intersubjective in our
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

work appeared in the article “The Representational World in Psycho-

analytic Therapy” (Stolorow, Atwood, and Ross, 1978), also com-
pleted in 1976, which Aron (1996) credited with having introduced
the concept of intersubjectivity into American psychoanalytic dis-
course. In “Transference and Countertransference: An Intersubjec-
tive Perspective” (a section of the article), we conceptualized the
interplay of transference and countertransference in psychoanalytic
treatment as an intersubjective process reflecting the mutual interac-
tion of the differently organized subjective worlds of patient and ana-
lyst (p. 249).4 Foreshadowing much work to come, we examined the
impact on the therapeutic process of unrecognized correspondences
and disparities—intersubjective conjunctions and disjunctions—
between the patient’s and analyst’s respective worlds of experience.
A nodal point in my professional development occurred in 1977
when the book review journal Contemporary Psychology invited me
to review Kohut’s (1977) new book, The Restoration of the Self—an
invitation I gladly accepted. I was immediately attracted to the
revolutionary nature of his theoretical proposals, in which he was

4
Our use of the term intersubjective has never presupposed the attainment of
symbolic thought, of a concept of oneself as a subject, of intersubjective relatedness
in Stern’s (1985) sense, or of mutual recognition as described by Benjamin (1995).
Nor have we confined our usage to the realm of unconscious nonverbal affective
communication, as Ogden (1994) seemed to do. We use intersubjective very
broadly, to refer to any psychological field formed by interacting worlds of experi-
ence, at whatever developmental level those worlds may be organized. For us,
intersubjective denotes neither a mode of experiencing nor a sharing of experience,
but the contextual precondition for having any experience at all. In our vision,
intersubjective fields and experiential worlds are equiprimordial, mutually consti-
tuting one another in circular fashion.
 548 ROBERT D. STOLOROW

throwing off the shackles of classical metapsychology and recast-

ing psychoanalysis as a “developmental phenomenology of the
self,” as I called it in my review (Stolorow, 1978b, p. 229). This new
theoretical paradigm, emphasizing the motivational centrality of
self-experience, seemed to fit like a glove with the suggestions for a
psychoanalytic phenomenology that Atwood and I had set forth in
Faces. Kohut was attempting, as we were, to reframe psychoanaly-
sis as pure psychology.
Kohut’s discussion of the empathic-introspective mode of obser-
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

vation in the last chapter of The Restoration of the Self led me to his
original article (Kohut, 1959) on that subject, which I had not read
before. The article, in which he contended that the empirical and
theoretical domains of psychoanalysis are defined and delimited by
its empathic-introspective mode of investigation, became my favor-
ite of Kohut’s works. What was intensely verifying for me was that
Kohut, by studying the relationship between mode of observation
and theory in psychoanalysis, had come to exactly the same conclu-
sion that Atwood and I had arrived at by studying the subjective ori-
gins of psychological theories—namely, that psychoanalysis, at all
levels of abstraction and generality, should be a depth psychology
of personal experience.
My first personal contact with Kohut came about as a result of my
reading The Restoration of the Self. Citing two articles (Stolorow,
1976; Stolorow and Atwood, 1976) in which I had shown how his
conceptualizations of narcissism and narcissistic transferences shed
light on the works of Rogers and Rank, Kohut, in the book’s preface,
erroneously included me among a group of critics who had faulted
him for failing to acknowledge sufficiently the prior contributions
of others. I wrote him a note expressing my surprise at this and af-
firming that I was a friendly admirer, not an opponent. With little
delay he sent me a gracious reply, apologizing for his mistake. Soon
thereafter, I sent him a draft of my review of his book, and he, in
turn, sent me a letter expressing his gratitude. I suspect that it was
my review and Kohut’s appreciation of it that led to my being in-
vited to speak at the first national self psychology conference in
Chicago in 1978.
My participation in this and subsequent such conferences was ex-
tremely important to me because, at the time, for a nonmedical analyst
like myself, still marginalized by the psychoanalytic establishment,
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 549

there was no other major forum for discussing my ideas (the Ameri-
can Psychological Association did not yet have its Division of Psy-
choanalysis) and no other context in which I could have a dialogue
with analysts from around the United States and the world. I con-
tinue to value my good friendships with colleagues in the self psy-
chology movement (including with Kohut before he died in 1981),
despite my objections to some aspects of Kohutian theory, such as
its reifications of self-experience, its reductionistic doctrine of “de-
fects in the self” (Atwood and Stolorow, 1997), and its attempt to
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

generalize important insights about the psychology of narcissism

into a theory of the total personality and the totality of analytic
transferences.
Another nodal point in my psychoanalytic development occurred
in 1979 when, at the second national self psychology conference in
Los Angeles, I heard Bernard Brandchaft deliver a paper on negative
therapeutic reactions, attributing these to patients’ experiences of
disruptions in the transference, to which the analyst’s faulty interpre-
tive stance had contributed (see Brandchaft, 1983). I had with me the
page proofs of a section from Psychoanalysis of Developmental Ar-
rests subtitled “The Therapeutic and Untherapeutic Action of Psy-
choanalysis” (p. 187), in which Lachmann and I made a similar point,
and I eagerly showed these to Brandchaft. We both felt an immediate
intellectual kinship, and soon thereafter he invited me to present a pa-
per at a conference on the borderline personality, to be held at UCLA
the following year. I accepted and suggested that we write the paper
together. Bernie agreed, and, during our ensuing discussions, we
learned that we had independently made almost identical observa-
tions about so-called borderline states. We had found that when a
very vulnerable, archaically organized patient is treated according to
the theoretical ideas and technical recommendations offered by
Kernberg (1975), that patient will quickly display all the characteris-
tics Kernberg ascribed to borderline personality organization, and
the pages in Kernberg’s books will come alive right before the clini-
cian’s eyes. On the other hand, when such a patient is treated accord-
ing to the theory and technical stance proposed by Kohut (1971), that
patient will soon show the features Kohut attributed to narcissistic
personality disorder, and Kohut’s pages will come alive. In our paper
(Brandchaft and Stolorow, 1984), we contended that borderline
states take form in an intersubjective field coconstituted by the
 550 ROBERT D. STOLOROW

patient’s psychological structures and the way these are understood

and responded to by the therapist.
Thus began my close friendship with Bernie and a series of collab-
orative studies (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1983, 1987;
Atwood and Stolorow, 1984) in which Brandchaft, Atwood, and I ex-
tended our intersubjective perspective to a wide array of clinical phe-
nomena, including development and pathogenesis, transference and
resistance, emotional conflict formation, dreams, enactments, neu-
rotic symptoms, and psychotic states. In each instance, phenomena
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

that had traditionally been the focus of psychoanalytic investigation

were understood not as products of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms
but as forming at the interface of interacting subjective worlds. The
intersubjective context, we contended, has a constitutive role in all
forms of psychopathology, and clinical phenomena cannot be com-
prehended psychoanalytically apart from the intersubjective field in
which they crystallize. In psychoanalytic treatment, as Kohut (1984)
also emphasized, the impact of the observer is grasped as intrinsic to
the observed.5
From 1976 until I relocated to Los Angeles in 1984, I was a pro-
fessor in the graduate school of psychology at the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine, where two additional colleagues had a deci-
sive impact on my development. Beatrice Beebe, who became a
good friend and one-time collaborator (Lachmann, Beebe, and
Stolorow, 1987), introduced me to infant research and to the dy-
namic systems thinking of Thelen and Smith (1994), both of which
contributed importantly to my understanding of the intersubjective
contexts of psychological development (Atwood and Stolorow,
1984) and developmental change (Stolorow, 1997). John Munder
Ross also became a friend, collaborated on the article noted earlier
in which the phrase intersubjective perspective first appeared, and,
most fatefully, introduced me to Charles Socarides and his daugh-
ter, Daphne. Dede, as she was called by friends and loved ones, be-
came both my collaborator and my wife. Our first joint article,

5
As an additional benefit of my collaboration with Bernie, my clinical sensibility
was enduringly enriched by his conceptualization of a broad class of organizing
principles that he calls structures of pathological accommodation (Brandchaft,
1993).
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 551

“Affects and Selfobjects” (Socarides and Stolorow, 1984/1985),

which reflected her boundless love of affect, was an attempt to inte-
grate our evolving intersubjective perspective with the framework
of self psychology. In our proposed expansion and refinement of
Kohut’s (1971) selfobject concept, we suggested that “selfobject
functions pertain fundamentally to the integration of affect” into the
organization of self-experience and that the need for selfobject ties
“pertains most centrally to the need for [attuned] responsiveness to
affect states in all stages of the life cycle” (p. 105). Kohut’s discus-
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

sions of the longing for mirroring, for example, were seen as point-
ing to the role of appreciative attunement in the integration of
expansive affect states, whereas his descriptions of the idealizing
yearning were seen as indicating the importance of attuned emo-
tional holding (Winnicott, 1965) in the integration of painful reac-
tive affect states. Emotional experience was grasped in this article
as being inseparable from the intersubjective contexts of attune-
ment and malattunement in which it was felt. That understanding
led in later works to further formulations contextualizing psycho-
logical conflict and the very boundary between consciousness and
unconsciousness (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). The so-called re-
pression barrier became graspable as an emergent property of dy-
namic intersubjective systems.
In essence, the article with Dede proposed a shift from the motiva-
tional primacy of drive to the motivational primacy of affectivity—a
theoretical shift that moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomeno-
logical contextualism and a central focus on dynamic intersub-
jective systems. Unlike drives, which originate deep within an
isolated mental apparatus, affect—that is, subjective emotional ex-
perience—is something that from birth onward is regulated, or
misregulated, within ongoing relational systems. Therefore, locat-
ing affect at the motivational center automatically entails a radical
contextualization of all aspects of human psychological life and of
the therapeutic process.
Daphne Socarides Stolorow died on February 23, 1991, four
weeks after her cancer had been diagnosed. During the summer of
that year, in the wake of devastating loss, George Atwood and I out-
lined our book Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of
Psychological Life (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). As we wrote in the
preface, “we drew closer and decided to try to create something
 552 ROBERT D. STOLOROW

lasting from the ashes of loss and sorrow” (p. xi). In this book, our
intersubjective perspective broadened into a sweeping methodolog-
ical and epistemological stance calling for a radical revision of all
aspects of psychoanalytic thought. Whereas our earlier work had
brought into focus the implications of this perspective for a range of
clinical issues, Contexts extended the intersubjectivity principle to
a rethinking and contextualization of the foundational pillars of
psychoanalytic theory, including the concept of the unconscious,
the relation between mind and body, the concept of trauma, and the
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

understanding of fantasy.
Other collaborators also contributed importantly to this book.
The chapter on fantasy was a revised version of an article Dede had
written with me (Stolorow and Stolorow, 1989), showing how an in-
troject fantasy vividly concretizes an intersubjective process of
psychological usurpation—the substitution of an alien perceptual
reality for one’s own invalidated experience. My good friends
Bernie Brandchaft and Jeffrey Trop joined me in authoring chapters
on therapeutic alliance and therapeutic impasse, respectively. The
chapter that most directly reflects the impact of losing Dede—the
chapter on trauma—was cowritten with Sheila Namir, Dede’s clos-
est friend. Sheila asked that she not be listed as coauthor of the chap-
ter, because she wanted her contribution to be a gift to me as well as a
tribute to Dede. In that chapter, we proposed that at the core of psy-
chological trauma is the profound lack of a relational home for pain-
ful affect, which thus becomes overwhelming and unendurable. The
person whom I would have wanted to hold my overwhelming grief
was the very same person who was gone. I felt that only George,
whose own world had been shattered by loss when he was a boy, re-
ally grasped my emotional devastation.
Donna Orange joined the collaboration in 1995 and soon became
a dear friend as well. With doctorates in both psychology and phi-
losophy, Donna expanded the explicitly philosophical dimension of
our evolving framework. Our first project began with the idea of a
clinical primer but was soon transformed into a book offering a
broad philosophy of psychoanalytic practice that we called con-
textualism (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow, 1997). Drawing on
Donna’s philosophical expertise, this book underlined the impor-
tance of practical wisdom (Aristotle’s phronesis) rather than techni-
cal rationality (techne) in psychoanalytic work, and emphasized
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 553

that our intersubjective perspective presupposes the hermeneutic,

perspectival, and thus fallible nature of all psychoanalytic under-
standing and knowing (see also Orange, 1995).
Subsequent works by the three of us have focused more explicitly
on the philosophical foundations of psychoanalytic theory and prac-
tice. In a series of articles (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 1999;
Stolorow, Orange, and Atwood, 2001a, b), we have shown how a range
of traditional and contemporary psychoanalytic viewpoints have been
undergirded by Descartes’s philosophical doctrine of the isolated
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

mind, and we have attempted to move psychoanalysis toward a post-

Cartesian contextualism that recognizes the constitutive role of related-
ness in the making of all experience, including experiences of personal
annihilation and disintegration of one’s world (Atwood, Orange, and
Stolorow, 2002). These and other papers were gathered in our book
Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Di-
mensions in Psychoanalysis (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002).
The last, but not least, collaboration I wish to chronicle is that with
Julia Schwartz, who was introduced to me by another dear friend,
Estelle Shane. Julia lit a candle in the dark world of my grieving, and
we married in 1994. In reflecting, over the course of the six years after
Dede’s death, on the profound sense of estrangement and isolation
that was a central feature of my experience of traumatic loss, I arrived
at a deepening understanding of psychological trauma that I thought
might be beneficial to others and that I wanted to write about. I dis-
cussed this with Julia, saying that I felt I had to describe my under-
standing autobiographically. It was only with Julia’s steadfast
support and encouragement that I was able to write the article (Stolo-
row, 1999). In that article, I concluded that psychological trauma,
fundamentally, is a shattering of the “sustaining absolutisms of ev-
eryday life” (p. 467), a catastrophic loss of innocence exposing the
“unbearable embeddedness of being” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992,
p. 22), the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is
random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of be-
ing can be assured. As a result, I contended, the traumatized person
cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the
absolutized horizons of normal everydayness. Consequently, the ex-
periential worlds of traumatized persons are felt to be essentially in-
commensurable with those of others; there is a deep chasm in which
an anguished sense of singularity and solitude takes form.
 554 ROBERT D. STOLOROW

Subsequently, Julia and I extended these ideas together, coauth-

oring an article on the impact of trauma in the presymbolic phase
(Schwartz and Stolorow, 2001). Drawing on one of Julia’s analytic
cases, we illustrated the lifelong consequences of traumatic viola-
tions during the first year of life in shattering a patient’s pre-
symbolic sense of the integrity and inviolability of her physical
being. More recently, again with Julia’s help, I completed a paper
on trauma and temporality, showing how trauma destroys one’s felt
sense of being-in-time (Stolorow, 2003).
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

Concluding Remarks

Most psychoanalytic theories have been the creation of a single ge-

nius working essentially in isolation, admiring disciples notwith-
standing. Our intersubjective systems theory, by contrast, has over
the course of its evolution taken form in a complex, richly varie-
gated nexus of deep, collaborative relationships, 6 and this, I believe,
accounts in part for its greater generality and inclusiveness. As
George Atwood is fond of saying, the process by which our inter-
subjective perspective is being created is a metalogue of its basic
principle—the claim that all human psychological products crystal-
lize within systems constituted by interacting, differently organized
worlds of experience. It has been a belief shared by the collaborators
of intersubjectivity theory that, when it comes to psychoanalytic
theorizing, many experiential worlds are better than one.

6
As a postscript, I add here a few brief comments on the contribution of aspects of
my earlier emotional development (illuminated in my personal analysis with Alex-
ander Wolf) to my attraction to two basic tenets of intersubjective systems the-
ory—its perspectivalist epistemology and its placing of affect at the center of psy-
chological life. My father was a man who believed and insisted that he had a
God’s-eye view (Putnam, 1990) of truth and reality, and my struggles against such
arrogance have contributed importantly to my advocacy of a level epistemological
playing field in the psychoanalytic situation. Additionally, my father’s affect so
dominated my mother’s world that I often felt emotionally erased, and her emo-
tional vitality seemed largely encased behind a wall of wooden depression. Hence, a
compelling theme in my life became the search for affective aliveness—both my
own and my mother’s—a quest to which my guiding psychoanalytic framework in-
evitably became heir.
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 555

REFERENCES

Aron, L. (1996), A Meeting of Minds. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Atwood, G. E., Orange, D. M. & Stolorow, R. D. (2002), Shattered worlds/psychotic
states: A post-Cartesian view of the experience of personal annihilation. Psycho-
anal. Psychol., 19:281–306.
_______ & Stolorow, R. D. (1980), Psychoanalytic concepts and the representational
world. Psychoanal. Contemp. Thought, 3:267–290.
_______ & _______ (1981), Experience and conduct. Contemp. Psychoanal., 17:
197–208.
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

_______ & _______ (1984), Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic

Phenomenology. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
_______ & _______ (1997), Defects in the self: Liberating concept or imprisoning met-
aphor? Psychoanal. Dial., 7:517–522.
_______ & Tomkins, S. (1976), On the subjectivity of personality theory. J. Hist.
Behav. Sci., 12:166–177.
Benjamin, J. (1995), Like Subjects, Love Objects. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.
Brandchaft, B. (1983), The negativism of the negative therapeutic reaction and the psy-
chology of the self. In: The Future of Psychoanalysis, ed. A. Goldberg. Madison,
CT: International Universities Press, pp. 327–359.
_______ (1993), To free the spirit from its cell. In: The Intersubjective Perspective, ed.
R. D. Stolorow, G. E. Atwood, & B. Brandchaft. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1994, pp.
57–76.
_______ & Stolorow, R. D. (1984), The borderline concept: Pathological character or
iatrogenic myth? In: Empathy II, ed. J. Lichtenberg, M. Bornstein & D. Silver.
Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, pp. 333–357.
Kernberg, O. F. (1975), Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. North-
vale, NJ: Aronson.
Klein, G. S. (1976), Psychoanalytic Theory. Madison, CT: International Universities
Press.
Kohut, H. (1959), Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis. J. Amer. Psychoanal.
Assn., 7:459–483.
_______ (1966), Forms and transformations of narcissism. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.,
14:243–272.
_______ (1968), The psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 23:86–113. Madison, CT: International Uni-
versities Press.
_______ (1971), The Analysis of the Self. Madison, CT: International Universities
Press.
_______ (1977), The Restoration of the Self. Madison, CT: International Universities
Press.
_______ (1984), How Does Analysis Cure? ed. A. Goldberg & P. Stepansky. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lachmann, F. M., Beebe, B. & Stolorow, R. D. (1987), Increments of separation in the
consolidation of the self. In: The Psychology of Separation and Loss, ed. J. & S.
Bloom-Feshbach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 396–415.
 556 ROBERT D. STOLOROW

Murray, H. A. (1938), Explorations in Personality. New York: Science Editions, 1962.

Ogden, T. (1994), Subjects of Analysis. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
Orange, D. M. (1995), Emotional Understanding. New York: Guilford Press.
_______ Atwood, G. E. & Stolorow, R. D. (1997), Working Intersubjectively: Con-
textualism in Psychoanalytic Practice. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Putnam, H. (1990), Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Sandler, J. & Rosenblatt, B. (1962), The concept of the representational world. The Psy-
choanalytic Study of the Child, 17:128–145. Madison, CT: International Universi-
ties Press.
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

Schafer, R. (1976), A New Language for Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Schwartz, J. M. & Stolorow, R. D. (2001), Trauma in a presymbolic world. Psychoanal.
Psychol., 18:380–387.
Socarides, D. D. & Stolorow, R. D. (1984/1985), Affects and selfobjects. Ann.
Psychoanal., 12/13:105–119.
Stern, D. (1985), The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books.
Stolorow, D. D. & Stolorow, R. D. (1989), My brother’s keeper: Intensive treatment of
a case of delusional merger. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 70:315–326.
Stolorow, R. D. (1969), Anxiety and defense from three perspectives. Psychiat. Quart.,
43:685–710.
_______ (1975a), The narcissistic function of masochism (and sadism). Internat. J.
Psycho-Anal., 56:441–448.
_______ (1975b), Toward a functional definition of narcissism. Internat. J. Psy-
cho-Anal., 56:179–185.
_______ (1976), Psychoanalytic reflections on client-centered therapy in the light of
modern conceptions of narcissism. Psychotherapy, 13:26–29.
_______ (1978a), The concept of psychic structure: Its metapsychological and clinical
psychoanalytic meanings. Internat. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 5:313–320.
_______ (1978b), The restoration of psychoanalysis [book review of The Restoration
of the Self, by H. Kohut]. Contemp. Psychol., 23:229–230.
_______ (1979), Psychosexuality and the representational world. Internat. J. Psy-
cho-Anal., 60:39–45.
_______ (1997), Dynamic, dyadic, intersubjective systems: An evolving paradigm for
psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Psychol., 14:337–346.
_______ (1999), The phenomenology of trauma and the absolutisms of everyday life: A
personal journey. Psychoanal. Psychol., 16:464–468.
_______ (2003), Trauma and temporality. Psychoanal. Psychol., 20:158–161.
_______ & Atwood, G. E. (1973), Messianic projects and early object-relations. Amer.
J. Psychoanal., 33:213–215.
_______ & _______ (1976), An ego-psychological analysis of the work and life of Otto
Rank in the light of modern conceptions of narcissism. Internat. Rev. Psycho-Anal.,
3:441–459.
_______ & _______ (1979), Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory.
Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS 557

_______ & _______ (1982), Psychoanalytic phenomenology of the dream. Ann.

Psychoanal., 10:205–220.
_______ & _______ (1984), Psychoanalytic phenomenology: Toward a science of hu-
man experience. Psychoanal. Inq., 4:87–105.
_______ & _______ (1992), Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of
Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
_______ _______ & Orange, D. M. (1999), Kohut and contextualism: Toward a
post-Cartesian psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanal. Psychol., 16:380–388.
_______ _______ & _______ (2002), Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosoph-
ical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 02:44 21 October 2014

_______ _______ & Ross, J. M. (1978), The representational world in psychoanalytic

therapy. Internat. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 5:247–256.
_______ Brandchaft, B. & Atwood, G. E. (1983), Intersubjectivity in psychoanalytic
treatment: With special reference to archaic states. Bull. Menn. Clin., 47:117–128.
_______ _______ & _______ (1987), Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective
Approach. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
_______ & Lachmann, F. M. (1980), Psychoanalysis of Developmental Arrests: The-
ory and Treatment. New York: International Universities Press.
_______ & _______ (1984/1985), Transference: The future of an illusion. Ann.
Psychoanal., 12/13:19–37.
_______ Orange, D. M. & Atwood, G. E. (2001a), Cartesian and post-Cartesian trends
in relational psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Psychol., 18:468–484.
_______ _______ & _______ (2001b), World horizons: A post-Cartesian alternative
to the Freudian unconscious. Contemp. Psychoanal., 37:43–61.
Thelen, E. & Smith, L. (1994), A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of
Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
White, R. W. (1987), A Memoir. Marlborough, NH: Homestead Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965), The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environ-
ment. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

2444 Wilshire Boulevard, #624

Santa Monica, CA 90403
rstolorow@adelphia.net