Intersubjectivity

The view that mental life takes shape between subjects, and not only inside a single mind. The term comes from phenomenology and entered psychoanalysis from the late 1970s and the 1980s by two main routes. Robert Stolorow and George Atwood's intersubjective systems theory treats every clinical phenomenon as arising where the subjective worlds of patient and analyst meet. Jessica Benjamin, drawing on Hegel and on infancy research, uses it for a developmental achievement: the capacity to recognise the other as a separate centre of experience, equivalent to oneself, rather than as an object of one's needs or fantasies. In her account the intersubjective dimension complements the intrapsychic world of internal objects instead of replacing it.