From holding receptacle to interior space – The protection and facilitation of subjectivity. Commentary on paper by Joyce Slochower

  • With the breakdown of the hegemonic hold of ego psychology on American psychoanalysis, we have been groping for ways to describe, explain, and label a new paradigm. A variety of terms have been offered, including participant observation, social constructivism, and intersubjectivity. In this paper, I use the phrase two-person psychology to embrace all these dimensions of the new paradigm. I suggest that both the ongoing struggle to define this paradigm and the proliferation of names for it are due to the fact that any viable psychoanalytic paradigm must address issues at least at three levels of discourse: the developmental (the origin of self and object representations), the ontological (the essentials of human nature), and the epistemological (on what basis and in what ways can we claim to know anything about anyone's unconscious psychology, including our own?). Perhaps the most widely recognized part of the one-person versus two-person dichotomy is the developmental component. At the developmental level, the question at stake has been whether we interpret as if children make themselves up or as if they are largely created by their parents. Ontologically, what is ultimately at stake in the one-person versus two-person debate is the fate of the concept of resistance. Any two person psychoanalytic theory of therapy will be forced to abandon the notions that resistance is intrapsychic and that resistance is the ego's primary agenda in the psychoanalytic situation. Finally, any psychology that is >two-person< at the epistemological level will assume that conscious insight, intellectual or emotional, is an event in a dialogue, not an achievement of a lone and private mind contemplating itself.

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Metadaten
Author:Charles Spezzano
Parent Title (English):Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 06 (1996), pp. 599-622.
Document Type:Articles
Language:English
Year of first Publication:1996
Release Date:2017/11/20
Format:xerox upon request / Fotokopie auf Anfrage
IdNo:Spezzano_C_1996
Erich Fromm's Library and Erich Fromm Archive:Articles / Artikel
Licence (German):
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