Intersubjectivity and relational psychoanalysis (Stolorow, Mitchell)
Experience is always formed between two subjectivities, so what happens in a relationship is co-created and can't be wholly assigned to either person. Your reading of someone is partly made by you: your history, your organising principles, and how you are with them.
What drives it
It corrects the one-person view in which the other person 'has' a pattern and you merely observe it. For reading people it's the discipline of asking what you contribute to what you see.
How it shows
Work
The 'difficult' report who is easy with another manager. The board sees a decisive CEO and the executive team sees a bully: both are real, and both are partly produced by the setting and by who is looking. Your assessment of someone shifts after a good or bad week with them. The colleague who 'always gets defensive' does so mainly when you raise things in a particular way.
Relationships
Each partner has a coherent account of the other's pathology, and each is accurate about what happens in this relationship and wrong as a description of the person. The sulking partner and the critical partner produce each other. A new partner experiences the same person very differently.
Self
Your read of someone feels like perception, not interpretation. The same trait bothers you in several people. Ask: who else sees them this way, who doesn't, and how are those people with them?
What tells it apart
Transference: Transference in the classic sense is one person's past distorting the present; intersubjectivity says both people's organising principles meet and produce the result. If the pattern shows with everyone they meet, look at transference; if mainly between the two of you, look at the pair.
Projective identification: Projective identification is a specific process in which one person induces a disowned feeling in another; intersubjectivity is the general frame that everything in the room is co-produced, including the observer's share.
Naive realism: Naive realism is the bias of believing you see things as they are; intersubjectivity is the clinical model of how your seeing is built, used to work out your part in a specific relationship.
A test
Ask two or three people who relate to the person differently (a peer, a junior, someone outside work) how they experience them, and compare with your read; the gap is roughly your share.
Questions to carry
- How do a peer, a junior and someone outside work each describe this person, and where do they differ?
- What do I bring to how this person seems to me, from my own history?
How strong the research is
clinical. A clinical framework with wide influence on psychoanalytic practice; its core claim, that how you see others is shaped by you, fits social-cognition findings such as naive realism, but the framework itself is little tested.
Where it comes from
Robert Stolorow and George Atwood, Structures of Subjectivity, 1984, and Contexts of Being, 1992; Stephen Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 1988
Sources
- Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (1988)
- Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (1988)
- Robert D. Stolorow and George E. Atwood, Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (1992)
- Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2018)