Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity
Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity
Transpersonal Psychology
Consciousness
Key Researchers
Jessica Benjamin
Judith Blackstone
Dan Zahavi
Roy Tzohar
B. Alan Wallace
Bill Waldron
Jeannine A. Davies
Brook Ziporyn
Gerald Dōkō Virtbauer
de Balbian, Ulrich
Loy, David
Joel Krueger
Joshua May
Evan Thompson
Brincat, S
Linda A. Chernus
G. E. Atwood
R. D. Stolorow
Lewis A. Kirshner
Christian de Quincey
Shaun Gallagher
Orange, D.M.
Alex Gillespie
Flora Cornish
Peter Buirski
Hanne De Jaegher
Vygotsky, Lev S.
Toma Strle
Merleau-Ponty M.
Buber, Martin
Mackenzie, Matthew
Source: The Buddhist Philosophical Conception of Intersubjectivity: an Introduction.
This paper serves as a retrospective introduction to a series of four tightly connected articlesFootnote 1published over the course of several issues in SOPHIA, all of which arose from a panel on the Buddhist Philosophical Notion of Intersubjectivity at the Yogācāra Studies Unit of the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, Atlanta, 2015). The growing online access to academic journals seems increasingly to obviate the need to group thematically related articles in a special issue, but nonetheless, readers may wish for some guidance regarding the editorial reasons for grouping them in a series, the common concerns they address, and the ways in which they relate to each other. This brief introduction therefore outlines a possible framework for approaching these papers, and suggests a particular order in which they can be most profitably read.
The philosophical engagement with the issue of intersubjectivity—i.e., the shared nature of our experiences, in particular of the external world—has evident significance for an array of Buddhist concerns. Intersubjective experience is of interest not just for its role in bridging the self and others, but also because it allows (and for the philosophical realist, indeed reaffirms) an emergent notion of objectivity. Viewed on the one hand against the background of the Buddhist metaphysics of momentariness and causality, the critique of the self, and nominalism, and on the other hand in light of the Buddhist emphasis on the practical and social role of the Sangha and of meaningful salvific discourse, intersubjectivity poses a particularly tenacious explanatory challenge for Buddhist schools of thought. It is a curious fact, then, that despite the significance of this topic and its relevance to the Buddhist understanding of personal identity, otherness, and the nature of the life-world, it has received relatively little explicit attention in either Buddhist philosophical writing (see Garfield’s response paper on this point) or contemporary scholarship. As a corrective, the AAR panel and the set of articles that ensued from it—by Kachru, Prueitt, and Tzohar, and a response paper by Garfield—addressed this theme from various angles. The overarching question at the background of the discussion was whether there is a uniquely Buddhist conception of intersubjectivity, and if so what it entails and what are its expressions in the Buddhist philosophical conception of experience, language, and the life-world.
Aiming to situate these questions within a concrete and continuous intellectual and historical context, the papers focus on the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition as a case study. Taken together, they provide a diachronic account of the development of this particular Buddhist approach to the topic, by tracing continuity, disruption, and innovation as the outcomes of shifting intellectual agendas in the works of Vasubandhu and his commentators (Tzohar), Dharmakīrti’s thought (Prueitt), and Ratnakīrti’s response (Kachru).
While they are attuned to differences between the respective accounts of these thinkers, the papers all seem to suggest certain overlapping concerns. These concerns, and the ways in which they were addressed by the Buddhist thinkers, are spelled out and assessed in Jay Garfield’s response paper, “I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru.” The most common concern, pointed out by Garfield, has to do with the need to account for and justify the possibility of intersubjective experiences under a view of phenomena as mind-dependent, and it is framed—not unlike the way it appears in the Western philosophical tradition—in terms of the perennial debate between the realist and the idealist. Another major if more subtle concern has to do with the question of meaning—in both the perceptual and the linguistic communicative realm—and how it can be construed intersubjectively so as to allow for shared perceptual content and efficacious actions, to account for successful and meaningful language use (in the constitution of norms), and to avoid the pitfalls of solipsism on the one hand or incommensurability on the other.
Dealing broadly with these concerns within the context of each thinker, the papers before us reveal the way in which intersubjectivity branches off into a range of fundamental questions in Buddhist metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, all of which are deeply grounded in particular Buddhist conceptions—of, for instance, cosmology, the category of species, the concept of mind and the operation of language. In this respect, the emergent collective account of Buddhist intersubjectivity serves as a step toward much needed conceptual groundwork regarding this notion in its original context, that is, groundwork that takes into account the meaning of specific specialized terms and categories involved in this notion, and the way in which it conveys a complex set of cultural preferences and doctrinal premises.
My own paper in the series, “Imagine being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” deals with the early Yogācāra strategies for explaining intersubjective agreement under a “mere representations” view. Thus, this paper presents the foundational tradition to which the other Buddhist thinkers react, and in this respect sets down the terms of the discussion taken up in the other three papers. Examining Vasubandhu’s, Asaṅga’s, and Sthiramati’s uses of the example of intersubjective agreement among the hungry ghosts (pretas)—an agreement explained by appeal to a shared karma—I demonstrate that the Yogācāra arguments should be understood as an ironic inversion of the realist premise; in other words, as showing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of external mind-independent objects, but in fact is incompatible with their existence. Under this account, I argue, intersubjectivity is not only possible under a “mere-representation” view but necessary for the coherence of the Yogācāra view. As Garfield observes about this Yogācāra reasoning, “it is the fact that external objects are imagined not by a single mind, but by many… that gives the argument its force, for that enables genuinely alternative realities to be compared to one another to demonstrate that reality, not hallucination, is mind-dependent” (Garfield, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7).
My paper goes on to explicate the emergent Yogācāra understanding of the life-world—as the outcome of the shared karma of all its beings—as a realm that is understood in terms of the self and others’ shared engagement in a common world. This has some affinity with the way the contemporary phenomenological tradition conceives of intersubjectivity, but unlike the phenomenological account, the Yogācāra takes the first-person perspective to be a product rather than the enabling condition of this engagement. Among the ramifications of this reluctance to privilege the first-person perspective, I argued, is a radical revision of the “shared” and “private” distinction as it is used with respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically.
Exploring the later development of these themes from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy of language is the focus of Catherine Prueitt’s paper “Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought.” The early Yogācāra attempt to uphold and justify intersubjectivity by appeal to shared karmic imprints (vāsanā) is the starting point for Prueitt’s paper, which explicates the way in which this strategy is used by Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 550–650 C.E.) to explain the absence of universals under his theory of apoha. While she traces the continuity between these two accounts, Prueitt points out important points in which Dharmakīrti departs from the early Yogācāra reasoning. For Dharmakīrti, she suggests, intersubjectivity was important not so much for defending a view of phenomena as mind-dependent but insofar as it was involved in the more fundamental question of how shared meaning—in its most fundamental function as concept formation—may be construed and normatively applied.
Prueitt’s paper demonstrates how, with the premise of the non-existence of universals, Dharmakīrti explains concept formation by tracing concepts ultimately to the mechanism of karmic imprints (which in turn are understood to be developed over countless lifetimes and continuously and recursively reshaped by ongoing actions). Couched in terms similar to those of the early Yogācāra account, according to Dharmakīrti, the extent to which individuals experience themselves as acting within a shared world (or not) depends on these imprints. Whatever is shared—manifested in terms of similar sensory capacities, habits, and aims—allows in turn for the judgment of sameness, that is, forms the basis for selectively collecting certain particulars (taking them as if having the same effects) under a single concept.
Prueitt’s argument goes on to show that Dharmakīrti’s appeal to karmic imprints also allows him to meet the critique (both traditional and modern) that his denial of the reality of the subject/object duality is incompatible with his theory of apoha. She concludes that Dharmakīrti’s reliance on karmic imprints on two distinct levels—one within the conventional world (i.e., concept formation), and one that constitutes the conventional world (i.e., the subject/object duality)—provides a round and complete account of intersubjectivity without relying on universals.
Proceeding to examine the changing conception of intersubjectivity within changing theories of mind in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition, Sonam Kachru’s paper “Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism” traces the outlines of what may be described as a paradigm shift in the tradition with respect to the conceptual foundations of intersubjectivity.
The paper achieves this by focusing on the response by Ratnakīrti (990–1050 C.E.) to Dharmakīrti’s attempt to defuse the threat of epistemological solipsism, with particular attention to the former’s sensitivity to the conceptual preconditions of this problem, and to the ways in which his conclusions differ from Dharmakīrti’s.
According to Kachru’s analysis, Ratnakīrti’s critique, in essence, is that Dharmakīrti overlooks the fact that in framing the problem he is helping himself to an equivocation between two distinct concepts of mind (which, however, remain inactive in forming his solution to the problem). The first is a notion of mind that emerges out of our ordinary linguistic practices, and the second, a phenomenological concept of mind as phenomenal presence. Given the latter conception of mind, so goes Ratnakīrti’s argument—which, as Garfield notes, has interesting affinities with similar treatments of the problem of other minds in contemporary philosophy of mind and language, beginning with Wittgenstein—there is indeed no justification for applying the concept of “other minds,” but neither are there any grounds to speak of “one’s own mind” (because insofar as the phenomenological concept of mind is experienced as such, we have no room to meaningfully ask whether there is only one mind or many). Kachru’s essay concludes by considering which of the different ways we find in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition to assuage epistemological solipsism we have reason to prefer, thereby exploring the impact these various theories of mind have had on the changing place of intersubjectivity within that tradition.
Notes
Guest edited by Roy Tzohar and Jake Davis, and include: Roy Tzohar, “Imagine Being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity” Sophia 56 (2017): 337–354; Catherine Prueitt, “Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought,” Sophia 57 (2018): 313–335; Sonam Kachru, “Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism,” Sophia 58 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0707-8; Jay L. Garfield, “I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy, Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru,” Sophia 58 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7.
A Buddhist Philosophical Approach to Intersubjectivity
CFS Lecture by Roy Tzohar, Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel
In this talk I propose that there is a uniquely Buddhist philosophical conception of intersubjectivity, and explore some of its expressions in the Buddhist conception of experience, language, and the social realm. For the Buddhist philosophical schools of thought, intersubjective experiences were of interest not just for their role in bridging the self and others, but also because they allegedly involve an emergent notion of objectivity. Given the Buddhist metaphysics of momentariness and causality and the critique of the first-person perspective, intersubjectivity posed a particularly tenacious explanatory challenge for Buddhist thought. In discussing how this challenge was met, I focus in particular on the strategies devised by one Buddhist school, the Indian Yogācāra, to explain intersubjective agreement under a view of phenomena as mind-dependent. This explanation, I show, involved an ironic inversion of the realist premise, since it proceeds by arguing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of mind-independent objects but is in fact incompatible with their existence. By delineating the phenomenological complexity underlying this account, I unpack the emergent Yogācāra account of intersubjectivity along with its implications for the understanding of being, the life-world, and alterity, and argue that it proposes a radical revision of the way in which we conceive of the “shared” and “private” distinction with respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically.
Roy Tzohar specializes in the history of philosophy with a focus on Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical traditions in India. He is currently an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies Department at Tel Aviv University. He holds a PhD from the Religion Department at Columbia University (New York, 2011), and an M.A. in philosophy from Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students (Tel Aviv, 2004). His research, under the Marie Curie IRG fellowship, concerns intersubjectivity and language in the Indian Buddhist Yogācāra thought. His monograph “Meaning in the World and in Texts: A Buddhist Theory of Metaphor” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
My Related Posts
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Meditations on Emptiness and Fullness
Indira’s Net: On Interconnectedness
Third and Higher Order Cybernetics
The Great Chain of Being
Law of Dependent Origination
Key Sources of Research
The Buddhist Philosophical Conception of Intersubjectivity: an Introduction.
Buddhism has become one of the main dialogue partners for different psychotherapeutic approaches. As a psychological ethical system, it offers structural elements that are compatible with psychotherapeutic theory and practice. A main concept in Mahāyāna-Buddhism and postmodern psychoanalysis is intersubjectivity. In relational psychoanalysis the individual is analysed within a matrix of relationships that turn out to be the central power in her/his psychological development. By realising why one has become the present individual and how personal development is connected with relationships, the freedom to choose and create a life that is independent from inner restrictions should be strengthened. In Mahāyāna-Buddhism, intersubjectivity is the result of an understanding of all phenomena as being in interdependent connection. Human beings are a collection of different phenomena and in constant interchange with everything else. Personal happiness and freedom from suffering depends on how this interchange can be realised in experience. The article focuses on the philosophical psychological fundaments in both approaches and emphasises clarification of to what the term ‘intersubjectivity’ exactly refers. This clarification is essential for the current dialogues, as well as further perspectives in this interdisciplinary field.
Intersubjectivity in Mahāyāna-Buddhism and Relational Psychoanalysis.
Intersubjectivity as an antidote to stress: Using dyadic active inference model of intersubjectivity to predict the efficacy of parenting interventions in reducing stress—through the lens of dependent origination in Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy
Ho S. Shaun, Nakamura Yoshio, Gopang Meroona, Swain James E.
“CHAPTER 11 What Is the Buddha Looking At? The Importance of Intersubjectivity in the T’ien-t’ai Tradition as Understood by Chih-li”
Ziporyn, Brook.
In Buddhism in the Sung edited by Daniel A. Getz and Peter N. Gregory, 442-476. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824843649-013
In this volume, volume 6, I will deal with insight and understanding, meaning and communication and intersubjectivity. (In an appendix I will include a number of -isms, cognitive biases and fallacies that might interfere in, with and distort these things.)
The latter is pre-supposed by, present, necessary and operating in all four of these notions when they are employed as verbs. I hope and intend to employ these words and explore them without the need for ghost-in-the-machine like mysterious, mystical and mythical ‘mental’ processes and organs such as ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ but by means of different meanings, dimensions, levels of t notions of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity enfolds (like a pregnant mother her foetus) insight, understanding, meaning and communication. Intersubjectivity is the beginning, the ground and reason for and the end of all meanings or sense that human beings could have. I am not interested in all the details of insight, experience, understanding, meaning, concepts and ideas, dialogue, discourse, interaction, communication (for example as speculated about by Habermas and his followers, Brandom et al). etc but merely the fact that these things require, assume, presuppose (different aspects, features, functions, processes, etc of) intersubjectivity. For those who are so inclined they could execute experiments (for example in the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences, anthropology, etc) to establish that what I state here is a fact and not merely speculate. I will leave speculation - about the activities and nature of the first, second and third person (the public, etc) participants in the activities and process of communication, the question of second and third contingencies, or Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity and/or Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity, the insufficiency of the former’s coordination and the need for synthesis, modes of structuration and the temporal dimensions of communication, threefold semiotic or twofold semiological structuralist theories of signs, theories of individualist or collective learning, action-directing models cultural models, pre-supposed structural features of the social relationships that are involved in communication, the structure parameters of for example the process of communication embedded in an intersubjective context (I would say all the following themselves are intersubjective), as discursive practice, including discourse, argumentation, communication, communication exchange, linguistic communication, everyday communication, interaction, etc - those, especially Continentals and those influenced by them, who suffer from the need for metaphysical speculation and to ontologize in complex terms about the most simple and obvious notions.
The reason for these attitudes of mine towards mental things, processes, organs, etc is that I do not believe they exist, apart from being umbrella-notions that refer to a number of undefined and not yet conceptualized meanings. They have their origins in uneducated, uninformed redundant myths and folk psychology. Their usage date back to almost pre-historic times in the evolution of human thinking and psychology and are conceptual remainders and linguistic left overs of primitive flat earth socio-cultural attitudes and beliefs.
I further need to make four points concerning my approach in this volume and my approach to or understanding of philosophy, they manner or style in which I write, especially in this volume and how I employ and interpret the nature and one function of intersubjectivity, both in this volume and in general. The latter I present as a kind of hypothesis and conclusion.
Institutionalized and internalized, competence intersubjectivity contain many user-illusions and an imaginary or manifest image of reality, including of themselves (Dennett and Sellars),. This can be contrasted we a comprehension or comprehensive, understanding intersubjectivity. It is possible and perhaps even necessary to transform or replace the competence intersubjectivity to a comprehension or understanding (scientific, Dennett and Sellars) image of reality and themselves.Ethics and morality and studies of ethics and morality deal with the reality of competence intersubjectivity (by means of socio-cultural practices that are derived from, based on an created by means of this restrictive, misleading, unreal, illusory, unrealistic intersubjectivity and the life-worlds associated with it) and human life-worlds constituted on the basis of and in terms of this intersubjectivity. This is why I am a nihilist, a libertarian, at least a minarchist or rather an anarchist and epistemologically a sceptic.
Kant’s things in themselves are similar to Dennett and Searle’s notions of manifest and scientific image. With my addition that we are socialized and internalize the competent, know how to do it, institutionalized manifest, everyday intersubjectivity, instead of the comprehension, insights and understanding knowing that, scientific intersubjectivity of all scientific disciplines.
Buddhist practices can be understood as inquiries into individual experience within a community, whereas analytic psychotherapy is an inquiry into mutual discovery through a dyadic relationship. While Buddhism invites us to investigate the subjective and objective worlds, psychotherapy especially invites us to investigate the intersubjective. In this program, we will explore both the resonances and divergences between psychotherapy and Buddhist practice in these regards, focusing on selected strands in depth psychology and psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and Zen, Pure Land Buddhism, and Vipassana Mindfulness, on the other. Themes of subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity will be especially helpful in thinking through Buddhism in a Western context, where the majority of practitioners are living in couple and family relationships. The program emphasizes both embodied practice and reflective inquiry.
Buddhist Notion of Intersubjectivity.
Bandyopadhyay, P. S. (Guest ed.), Tzohar, R. (Guest ed.), & Davis, J. (Guest ed.) (2019).
This paper disputes the claim that the so-called soul-body dualism finds its solution in the analysis of the intersubjectivity from the viewpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and in the concept of selflessness in the philosophy of Mahayana-Buddhism. The intentionality of instinctual drive as the passive synthesis provides the reason for Husserl’s intersubjectivity and the possibility of Buber’s I-Thou relation. The selflessness in this relation is the concept of Buber’s thou and in Husserl’s intersubjectivity lies in the interesting connection with the non-egological dimension of Buddhism.
“‘I’ Without ‘I am’: On the Presence of Subjectivity in Early Buddhism, in the Light of Transcendental Phenomenology”.
Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy (Book Review)
Title: Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy Author: Magid, Barry Publisher: Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002 Reviewed By: Susan B. Parlow, Winter 2004, pp. 34-36
LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Empathy and Consciousness
Evan Thompson
First a consulting report prepared for the Fetzer Institute (Kalamazoo, MI) that also served as the discussion paper for the meeting I convened at Fetzer on ‘The Intersubjectivity of Human Consciousness: Integrating Phenomenology and Cognitive Science’ (Sep- tember 24–27, 1999), and the second my opening address to this meeting.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 5–7, 2001, pp. 1–32
Intersubjectivity Theory Revisited: A 30-Year Retrospective,
Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, edited by G. E. Atwood, & R. D. Stolorow (2014). New York, NY: Routledge,
The author views the analytic enterprise as centrally involving an effort on the part of the analyst to track the dialectical movement of individual subjectivity (of analyst and analysand) and intersubjectivity (the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair—the analytic third). In Part I of this paper, the author discusses clinical material in which he relies heavily on his reverie experiences to recognize and verbally symbolize what is occurring in the analytic relationship at an unconscious level. In Part II, the author conceives of projective identification as a form of the analytic third in which the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand are subjugated to a co-created third subject of analysis. Successful analytic work involves a superseding of the subjugating third by means of mutual recognition of analyst and analysand as separate subjects and a reap-propriation of their (transformed) individual subjectivities.
The relational unconscious is the fundamental structuring property of each interpersonal relation; it permits, as well as constrains, modes of engagement specific to that dyad and influences individual subjective experience within the dyad. Three usages of the concept of thirdness are delineated and contrasted with the concept of the relational unconscious, which, it is suggested, has the advantage of being both consistent with existing views of unconscious processes and more directly applicable to therapeutic concerns. Enactments and intersubjective resistances are viewed as clinical manifestations of the relational unconscious, and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis results, in part, from altering the structure of the relational unconscious that binds analysand and analyst.
In this book, Lewis Kirshner explains and illustrates the concept of intersubjectivity and its application to psychoanalysis. By drawing on findings from neuroscience, infant research, cognitive psychology, Lacanian theory, and philosophy, Kirshner argues that the analytic relationship is best understood as a dialogic exchange of signs between two subjects—a semiotic process. Both subjects bring to the interaction a history and a set of unconscious desires, which inflect their responses. In order to work most effectively with patients, analysts must attend closely to the actual content of the exchange, rather than focusing on imagined contents of the patient’s mind. The current situation revives a history that is shaped by the analyst’s participation.
Intersubjective Systems Theory in Psychoanalysis – An Overview
George E. Atwood, Robert D. Stolorow, and Donna M. Orange are the core theorists of intersubjective systems theory, a form of psychoanalytic practice that focuses on the relational origins of mental distress and does so through the interpersonal and intersubjective relationship of the analyst and analysand.
These theorists, all of whom are practicing psychoanalysts, have rejected the Cartesian version of self as a unitary, isolated entity, and have likewise rejected mental illness as an intrapsychic dysfunction. In their model, which relies heavily on phenomenological philosophy as its explanatory foundation, the patient’s troubles (excluding organic disease or physical trauma) exist only within the experiential and relational contexts in which they developed.
There are two powerful and often implicit beliefs that underlie most current psychotherapeutic models: (1) the Myth of Modeling, “a way of thinking which over-emphasizes the conscious, cognitive, rational and technique based aspects of the psychoanalytic encounter” (Mikko Martela and Esa Saarinen, 2008), and (2) the Myth of the Isolated Mind (Stolorow and Atwood 2002), a remnant of the Cartesian dualism that has infected Western philosophy until the middle of the 20th Century and still is embedded in modern psychology.
Intersubjective systems theory (IST, or intersubjectivity theory) proposes that minds are not isolated, unitary things that exist as individual entities, as though in a vacuum. Rather, minds exist within interpersonal and intersubjective relationships, beginning at birth (and even before) with the attachment bond to the mother, and they develop within interpersonal, intersubjective, relational contexts.
Here is a wide-angle definition of intersubjectivity from Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish (2009):
Gillespie, A. & Cornish, F. (2009). Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40:1; 20-46.
Intersubjectivity is central to the social life of humans. Thus, unsurprisingly, research pertaining, either directly or indirectly, to intersubjectivity spans many research areas of psychology. In developmental psychology it lies just below the surface of widely used concepts such as decentration (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), theory of mind (Doherty, 2008) and perspective taking (Martin, Sokol and Elfers, 2008). In neuroscience, intersubjectivity has recently become a popular topic with the discovery of “mirror neurons” which are thought to provide a neurological basis for imitation, theory of mind, language, and social emotions (Hurley & Chater, 2005). In the field of comparative psychology, there has been a surge of interest in intersubjectivity, in the form of investigations of possible perspective-taking amongst, for example, monkeys (Tomasello, Call and Hare, 2003) and scrub jays (Emery & Clayton, 2001). Intersubjectivity, going by various names, is also central to research on communication. Phenomena such as addressivity, double voiced discourse, and dialogue are deeply intersubjective (Linell, 2009). Intersubjectivity has also been identified as important in small group research because it has been found that mutual understanding within small groups creates increased efficiency, reliability and flexibility (Weick & Roberts, 1993). Research on self and identity has long emphasised the importance of Self’s perceptions of Other’s perceptions of Self (James, 1890; Howarth, 2002). In the field of counselling, much therapeutic effort is directed at resolving misunderstandings and feelings of being misunderstood both of which indicate dysfunctional intersubjective relations (Cooper, 2009). (p. 20)
Unfortunately, intersubjective theory falls into an area of overlap between psychology and sociology, and the insularity of each has precluded any serious cooperation in terms of research. Most of the research has been done in the realm of psychology and philosophy (especially by Stolorow and Orange).
Mind, as understood by current developmental research, is a relational construction. As we have discussed previously, there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity and there can be no intersubjectivity without subjectivity (Buirski and Haglund, 2001). That is, subjective worlds of personal experience are inextricably embedded in intersubjective systems. When viewed from a systems or contextual perspective, distinctions, like those between one-person and two-person psychologies, are revealed as too limited because worlds of personal experience encompass more than just the two people involved. (p. 4)
Kenneth Gergen (Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community, 2009) offers another way of looking at this, specifically at the therapeutic relationship within a relational context.
We now turn to the therapeutic relationship itself. From the present standpoint, how are we to understand the relationship between therapist and client, its potentials, and its efficacy? In responding to this question, we are invited to think beyond the tradition of bounded being in which the aim of therapy is to “cure” the mind of the individual client. The metaphors of the therapist as one who “plumbs the depths,” or serves as a mechanic of the cognitive machinery must be bracketed. We also set aside the causal model in which the therapist acts upon the client to produce change. Rather, we are invited to view the therapist and client as engaged in a subtle and complex dance of co-action, a dance in which meaning is continuously in motion, and the outcomes of which may transform the relational life of the client.
Consider the situation: Both therapist and client enter the therapeutic relationship as multi-beings. Both carry with them the residues of multiple relationships. Therapists bring not only a repertoire of actions garnered from their history of therapeutic relations; they also carry potentials from myriad relations stretching from childhood to the present. Likewise, clients enter carrying a repertoire of actions, some deemed problematic, but alongside a trove of less obvious alternatives. The primary question, then, is whether the process of client/therapist coordination can contribute to a transformation in relationships of extended consequence. Can their dance together reverberate across the client’s relational plane in such a way that more viable coordination results? This is no small challenge, for the client’s plane of relationships is complex and fluid. (p. 282, Kindle Edition)
Much of IST is based in philosophy. Stolorow and his collaborators believe that in order to make sense of the therapeutic relationship, we need make objects of our subjective beliefs about the mind. If we believe in a unitary, isolated mind, we are going to relate to our clients as objects to be fixed, to see their pain as faulty scripts that we have the expertise to reprogram.
But if we believe in the social construction of mind within its physical, intrapsychic, intersubjective, and environmental contexts, then we are more likely to approach the client with a relational and co-constructive perspective on the therapeutic process, where healing comes from relationship and process (for example, the co-transference process).
This is how they explain the need for self-analysis:
Atwood, G.E., Stolorow, R.D. & Orange, D.M. (2011, Jun). The Madness and Genius of Post-Cartesian Philosophy: A Distant Mirror. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(3), 263-285.
In studying the psychological sources of philosophical ideas, we go against a pervasive opinion in contemporary intellectual circles that is rooted in Cartesianism. This opinion, perhaps surprising in its prevalence so long after the life and death of Descartes, arises from a continuing belief—one could almost say a mystical faith—in the autonomy of the life of the mind. The products of the mind are in this view to be treated as independent, self-sufficient creations, verified, falsified, or otherwise evaluated according to criteria that exist apart from the personal contexts out of which they arise. Any attempt to bring considerations of origin to bear on the understanding and development of intellectual works is seen to exemplify the unforgivable fallacy of ad hominem reasoning. It is therefore said that the study of the individual details of a thinker’s life, although perhaps of some limited interest as simple biography, can in principle have no relevance to the broader enterprise of the development or evaluation of that thinker’s work in its own terms. Intellectual constructions are claimed to have a life of their own, freely subsisting in the realm of public discourse, above and beyond the historical particularities of specific contributors’ personal life circumstances. (p. 264)
Our thesis here is that the task of self-analysis must be extended to the philosophical premises underlying psychoanalytic inquiry which, like all specific theoretical ideas in the field, also necessarily embody the analyst’s personal forms of being. Our approach to this great task is to study the individual worlds of selected post-Cartesian philosophers, with the aim of comprehending the psychological sources of each thinker’s specific repudiation of Cartesian doctrines. We hope to use the insights gained in this study as a distant mirror to which we may turn for a clarifying glimpse of how our own departures from the Cartesian view also reflect the patterns of our specific personal worlds. It is our additional faith that such an undertaking of self-reflection carries with it the possibility of the opening up of new pathways of inquiry for our discipline and the enrichment of psychoanalytic practice. (p. 266-267)
The following quotes are from Stolorow (in an interview) on the practice of IST in a clinical setting, which is it becomes useful for me as a clinician. It is important to note that there is no uniform body of technique to which all proponents of ITS adhere, nor is there any standardized or manualized series of interventions. If there is one thing upon which they all agree it’s that every treatment is unique and must be created anew by its participants. So even Stolorow is only speaking for himself here, not for all the other advocates for ITS.
Stolorow, R., & Sassenfeld, A. (2010, Summer). A Phenomenological-Contextual Psychoanalyst: Intersubjective-Systems Theory and Clinical Practice. Psychologist-Psychoanalyst: APA Division 39, Psychoanalysis; 6-10.
I describe intersubjective-systems theory as a “phenomenological contextualism.” It is phenomenological in that it investigates organizations or worlds of emotional experience. It is contextual in that it claims that such organizations of emotional experience take form, both developmentally and in the therapeutic situation, in constitutive intersubjective contexts.
Developmentally, recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system give rise to principles that unconsciously organize subsequent emotional and relational experiences. Such unconscious organizing principles are the basic building blocks of the personality. They show up in the therapeutic situation in the form of transference, which intersubjective systems theory conceptualizes as unconscious organizing activity. The patient’s transference experience is co-constituted by the patient’s unconscious organizing principles and whatever is coming from the analyst that is lending itself to being organized by them. A parallel statement can be made about the analyst’s transference. The interplay of the patient’s transference and the analyst’s transference is an example of what we call an intersubjective field or system.
From an intersubjective-systems perspective, all of the clinical phenomena with which psychoanalysis has been traditionally concerned: manifest psychopathology, transference, resistance, therapeutic impasses, therapeutic action, emotional conflict, indeed, the unconscious itself are seen as taking form within systems constituted by the interplay between differently organized, mutually influencing subjective worlds. (p. 6)
And more from the 2010 interview with Sassenfeld:
One’s philosophical presuppositions, and one’s awareness or unawareness of them, can have a monumental clinical impact. For example, the Cartesian objectivist analyst who sees himself/herself as treating deranged isolated minds and correcting “distortions” of what he/she “knows” to be true can unwittingly retraumatize his/her patients by repeating devastating early experiences of massive invalidation. On the other hand, the phenomenological-contextualist analyst, in seeking to understand and make sense out his/her patients’ experiences in terms of the contexts of meaning in which they occur, no matter how bizarre these experiences may seem to be, helps to create a therapeutic bond in which genuine psychological transformation can gradually take place. (p. 6-7)
But this does not lead inevitably to some form of navel-gazing relativism.
A phenomenological, contextualist, perspectivalist stance, although embracing a fallibilistic attitude of epistemological humility and a level epistemological playing field in the therapeutic situation (no one has privileged access to truth and reality), should not be confused with postmodern nihilism or relativism. Relativity to context and to perspective is not the same thing as a relativism that considers every framework to be as good as the next. Pragmatically, some ideas are better than others in facilitating psychoanalytic inquiry and the psychoanalytic process. Moreover, we do not abandon the search for truth, that is, for lived experience.
Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of such truth are gradually achieved through a psychoanalytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective awareness is enlarged for both participants. Truth, in other words, is dialogic, crystallizing from the inescapable interplay of observer and observed.
My own phenomenological orientation did not, by the way, originate in Kohut’s self psychology. Its origins go back to a series of studies that George Atwood and I conducted in the early and mid-1970s investigating the personal subjective origins of four psychoanalytic theories. These studies were collected together in our first book, Faces in a Cloud, which was completed in 1976 (although not published until 1979), one year prior to the birth of Kohut’s self psychology. In the concluding chapter of our book, we reasoned that, since psychoanalytic theories can be shown to a significant degree to be shaped by the personal subjectivity of their creators, what psychoanalysis needs to be is a theory of subjectivity itself–a depth psychology of personal experience broad enough to encompass, not only the phenomena that other theories address, but also these theories themselves. We christened pur proposed framework “Psychoanalytic Phenomenology,” but that appellation never caught on. It was that framework that gradually evolved into intersubjective-systems theory.
A phenomenological emphasis does not in anyway entail abandonment of the exploration of unconsciousness. Going back to the father of philosophical phenomenology; Edmund Husserl, phenomenological inquiry has never been restricted to mere description of conscious experiences. Phenomenological investigation has always been centrally concerned with the structures that unconsciously organize conscious experience. Whereas philosophical phenomenologists are concerned with those structures that operate universally, a psychoanalytic phenomenologist seeks to illuminate those principles that unconsciously organize individual worlds of experience. Such principles include, importantly, those that dictate the experiences that must be prevented from coming into full being, that is, repressed, because they are prohibited or too dangerous. Intersubjective-systems theory emphasizes that all such forms of unconsciousness are constituted in relational contexts. The very boundary between conscious and unconscious (the repression barrier) is seen, not as a fixed intrapsychic structure within an isolated mind, but as a property of ongoing dynamic intersubjective systems. Phenomenology leads us inexorably to contextualism. (p. 7)
According to Orange (1995, p. 8), “Intersubjectivity theory sees human beings as organizers of experience, as subjects. Therefore it views psychoanalytic treatment as a dialogic attempt of two people to understand one person’s organization of emotional experience by ‘making sense together’ of their shared experience” (p. 26)
Another note of clarification is needed here. Although ITS makes a point of the co-transference and the co-creation on the intersubjective space, there is not full equality in the relationship. I, as the therapist, am talking less than my client and offering questions, clarifications, or interpretations when I do speak, while the client is telling me the story of who s/he is and how it feels to be in that subjective space.
In practice, what a ITS psychotherapist says in a session may look no different than what any experienced psychotherapist might say in a session. Buirski (2005) notes:
I try to articulate my grasp of the other’s subjective world of experience, which is what I believe most good therapists, regardless of theory, do most of the time. Perhaps the difference lies in the inverse: what distinguishes the therapist working from the intersubjective systems perspective from the therapists working from other orientations is to be found more in what they do not do or say than in what they actually do or say. For example, we try to avoid taking an objectivist stance, assuming that we are privy to some greater authority or knowledge than the other. And we avoid pathologizing, which is revealed by a focus on the person’s maladaptive behaviors or motives, like his masochism. Instead we wonder about how the person’s striving for health might be obscured by behaviors or motives that appear self-defeating. (xvi-xvii).
Finally, the following comments from Stolorow come from a 1998 article/response to another author (George Frank) who had raised objections to the ITS model. This piece is an attempt to explain the foundational ideas of intersubjective systems theory more clearly (and to discredit the critic). Stolorow and his collaborators were getting a lot of push-back from more traditional psychoanalytic therapists who thought they were staging a coup (they were, really, bringing a whole new perspective into the psychoanalytic and therapeutic equation). There are many similar articles from the 1990s, including some from Donna Orange, as well.
Stolorow, R.D. (1998). Clarifying the intersubjective perspective: A reply to George Frank. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 424-427. doi: 10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.424
In response to Frank, G. (1998). The intersubjective school of psychoanalysis: Concerns and questions. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 420-423. doi:10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.420
I have quoted almost all of the article since it was short and the material is less coherent without the full context.
First, the collaborators of intersubjectivity theory have not sought to create yet another “school of psychoanalysis,” if what is meant by that phrase is a fixed metapsychological doctrine with accompanying rules of technique. Rather, the intersubjective perspective offers a unifying framework for conceptualizing psychoanalytic work of all theoretical schools. The hallmark of our viewpoint is a clinical sensibility emphasizing “the inescapable interplay of observer and observed” (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 9). It is not our aim to have our theory replace Freud’s “as the theory that can explain the psychological life of humans” (Frank, 1998, p. 420). On the contrary, intersubjectivity theory exists at a different level of abstraction and generality than does Freud’s and other psychoanalytic theories, in that it does not posit particular psychological contents that are presumed to be universally salient in personality development and in pathogenesis. It is a process theory offering broad methodological and epistemological principles for investigating and comprehending the intersubjective contexts in which psychological phenomena, including psychoanalytic theories (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993), arise. It also provides a framework for integrating different psychoanalytic theories by contextualizing them. From an intersubjective perspective, the content themes of various metapsychological doctrines can be de-absolutized, de-universalized, and recognized as powerful metaphors and imagery that can become salient in the subjective worlds of some people under particular intersubjective circumstances (Orange et al., 1997).
Second, we have never made the absurd claim, which Frank attributed to us, that “there is no objective reality” (Frank, 1998, p. 421). We have instead consistently maintained that objective reality is unknowable by the psychoanalytic method, which investigates only subjective reality as it crystallizes within the intersubjective field of an analysis. Frank was correct when he concluded that from our point of view the analyst has no privileged access to “what is really going on between patient and analyst.” All psychoanalytic understanding is interpretive. This means that there are no neutral or objective analysts, no immaculate perceptions, no God’s-eye views of anything. Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of “what is really going on” are gradually achieved through an analytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective selfawareness is enlarged for both participants. There is no danger of solipsism or of relativism here, only a contextual, perspectival, and fallibilistic epistemology (Orange, 1995) that consistently “opens our horizons to expanded possibilities of meaning” (Orange et al., 1997, p. 89).
Third, Frank was incorrect when he inferred that our intersubjective contextualism means that we “have moved away from” (Frank, 1998, p. 422) our focus on the invariant principles that unconsciously organize experience:
Some may see a contradiction between the concept of developmentally preestablished principles that organize subsequent experiences and our repeated contention that experience is always embedded in a constitutive intersubjective context. This contradiction is more apparent than real. A person enters any situation with an established set of ordering principles (the subject’s contribution to the intersubjective system), but it is the context that determines which among the array of these principles will be called on to organize the experience. Experience becomes organized by a particular invariant principle only when there is a situation that lends itself to being so organized. The organization of experience can therefore be seen as codetermined both by preexisting principles and by an ongoing context that favors one or another of them over the others. (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 24)
Fourth, Frank confused the aim of analysis with the method of analysis when he mistakenly concluded that we advocate “analyzing] the interaction between patient and analyst to understand the nature of that interaction” (Frank, 1998, p. 422). From our perspective, the aim of an analysis has always been the illumination of the patient’s world of personal experience, but the method of investigation must continually take into account its own exquisite context sensitivity:
The development of psychoanalytic understanding may be conceptualized as an intersubjective process involving a dialogue between two personal universes. The goal of this dialogue is the illumination of the inner pattern of a life, that distinctive structure of meanings that connects the different parts of an individual’s world into an intelligible whole. The actual conduct of a psychoanalysis . . . comprises a series of empathic inferences into the structure of an individual’s subjective life, alternating and interacting with the analyst’s acts of reflection upon the involvement of his own personal reality in the ongoing investigation. (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 5)
[Intersubjectivity theory] views psychoanalysis as the dialogic attempt of two people together to understand one person’s organization of emotional experience by making sense together of their intersubjectively configured experience. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 5)
Fifth, contrary to Frank’s misperception, there is nothing in our view of psychoanalytic investigation that could result in “ignoring the patient’s history” (Frank, 1998, p. 423):
Clinically, we find ourselves, our patients, and our psychoanalytic work always embedded in constitutive process. Process means temporality and history. To work contextually is to work developmentally. To work developmentally is to maintain a continuing sensibility to past, present, and future experience…. [It] affirms the emotional life of persons who have come from somewhere and are going somewhere. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 77)
Sixth, it is clear, I hope, that Frank (1998) seriously mischaracterized our views when he claimed that we “abandon” the intrapsychic world or adopt “an extreme position contra Freud’s intrapsychic orientation” (p. 423). I close with an explicit statement of our position on this matter:
We must emphasize, because we are often misunderstood on this point [!], that the intersubjective viewpoint does not eliminate psychoanalysis’s traditional focus on the intrapsychic. Rather, it contextualizes the intrapsychic. The problem with classical theory was not its focus on the intrapsychic, but its inability to recognize that the intrapsychic world, as it forms and evolves within a nexus of living systems, is profoundly context-dependent. (Orange et al., 1997, pp. 67-68)
Martela, M. & Saarinen, E. (2008). Overcoming the objectifying bias implicit in therapeutic practice – Intersubjective Systems Theory complemented with Systems Intelligence. Unpublished manuscript.
“Intersubjectivity and Physical Laws in Post-Kantian Theory of Knowledge Natorp and Cassirer”
Edgar, Scott.
In The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment edited by J Tyler Friedman and Sebastian Luft, 141-162. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110421811-007
Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding this theory. Schutz tied intersubjectivity to the way people experience the world of everyday life: a world that he held as distinct from other provinces of meaning, such as religious experience, humor, or scientific reasoning. However, as this article shows, such neat distinctions are problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: The cognitive styles that define different provinces of meaning often bleed into one another; people often inhabit multiple provinces of meaning simultaneously. Intersubjectivity may thus be simultaneously anchored in multiple worlds, opening a host of empirical research questions: not only about how intersubjectivity is done in interaction, but about how different kinds of intersubjective experiences are constructed, how multi-layered they are, as well as opening up questions about possible asymmetries in the experiences of intersubjectivity.
Intersubjectivity Theory Revisited: A 30-Year Retrospective:
Chernus, Linda. (2017).
Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, edited by G. E. Atwood, & R. D. Stolorow (2014). New York, NY: Routledge, 157 pp.,
Psychoanalytic Social Work. 24. 1-8. 10.1080/15228878.2017.1346516.
Correspondence: Thomas J. Csordas, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Social Sciences Building 210, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, USA E-mail: tcsordas@ucsd.edu
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. and George E. Atwood, Ph.D.
In our early psychobiographical studies of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979), we found that psychoanalytic metapsychologies derive profoundly from the personal, subjective worlds of their creators. This finding, which has a powerfully relativizing impact on one’s view of psychological theories, led us inexorably to the conclusion that what psychoanalysis needs is a theory of subjectivity itself‐a unifying framework that can account not only for the phenomena that other theories address but also for the theories themselves.
Our own proposals for such a framework (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992), have undergone a significant process of development during the past two decades, culminating in what we have come to call the theory of intersubjectivity. The central metaphor of our intersubjective perspective is the larger relational system or field in which psychological phenomena crystallize and in which experience is continually and mutually shaped. Our vocabulary is one of interacting subjectivities, reciprocal mutual influence, colliding organizing principles, conjunctions and disjunctions, attunements and malattunements‐a lexicon attempting to capture the endlessly shifting, constitutive intersubjective context of intrapsychic experience, both in the psychoanalytic situation and in the course of psychological development. From this perspective, the observer and his or her language are grasped as intrinsic to the observed, and the impact of the analyst and his or her organizing activity on the unfolding of the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a focus of analytic investigation and reflection.
Intersubjectivity theory is a field theory or systems theory in that it seeks to comprehend psychological phenomena not as products
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of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms, but as forming at the interface of reciprocally interacting worlds of experience. Psychological phenomena, we have repeatedly emphasized, “cannot be understood apart from the intersubjective contexts in which they take form” (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, p. 64). Intrapsychic determinism thus gives way to an unremitting intersubjective contextualism. It is not the isolated individual mind, we have argued, but the larger system created by the mutual interplay
between the subjective worlds of patient and analyst, or of child and caregiver, that constitutes the proper domain of psychoanalytic inquiry. Indeed, as we have shown, the concept of an individual mind or psyche is itself a psychological product crystallizing from within a nexus of intersubjective relatedness and serving specific psychological purposes (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
Psychological Development and Pathogenesis
Intersubjectivity theory is both experience‐near and relational; its central constructs seek to conceptualize the organization of personal experience and its vicissitudes within an ongoing intersubjective system. It differs from other psychoanalytic theories in that it does not posit particular psychological contents (the Oedipus complex, the paranoid and depressive positions, separation‐ individuation conflicts, idealizing and mirroring longings, and so on) that are presumed to be universally salient in personality development and in pathogenesis. Instead, it is a process theory offering broad methodological and epistemological principles for investigating and comprehending the intersubjective contexts in which psychological phenomena arise. With regard to psychological development, for example, we have proposed that the “organization of the child’s experience must be seen as a property of the child‐caregiver system of mutual regulation” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 23) and that it is the “recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system [that] result in the establishment of invariant principles that unconsciously organize the child’s subsequent experiences” (p. 24). The concept of intersubjectively derived unconscious organizing principles‐what we term the realm of “the prereflective unconscious” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992)‐is our alternative to the notion of unconscious instinctual fantasy. It is these unconscious
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ordering principles, forged within the crucible of the child‐caregiver system, that form the basic building blocks of personality development and that constitute the quintessential focus of psychoanalytic investigation and interpretation. The essence of psychoanalytic cure lies in the establishment of new, alternative principles for organizing experience, so that the patient’s experiential repertoire becomes enlarged, enriched, more flexible, and more complex (Stolorow, 1994).
Increasingly, we have found that those principles that unconsciously organize patients’ experience of affect are of the greatest import clinically. From early recurring experiences of malattunement, patients have acquired the unconscious conviction that their unmet developmental yearnings and reactive feeling states are manifestations of a loathsome defect or of an inherent inner badness. Qualities or activities of the analyst that lend themselves to being interpreted according to such automatic meanings of affect, confirm the patient’s fears and expectations in the transference that emerging feelings will be met with disgust, disdain, disinterest, alarm, hostility, withdrawal, exploitation, and so on, or will damage the analyst and destroy the therapeutic bond. The investigation and illumination of these invariant meanings as they take form within the intersubjective dialogue between patient and analyst can produce powerful therapeutic reactions in liberating the patient’s affectivity and in strengthening the patient’s capacities for affect tolerance, integration, and articulation. We regard such expansion and enrichment of the patient’s affective life as central aims of an analytic process.
Any pathological constellation can be understood, from our perspective, only in terms of the unique intersubjective contexts in which it originated and is continuing to be maintained. “The intersubjective context,” we have contended, “has a constitutive role in all forms of psychopathology” (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987, p. 3), and “the exploration of the particular patterns of intersubjective transaction involved in developing and maintaining each of the various forms of psychopathology is…one of the most important areas for continuing clinical psychoanalytic research” (p. 4). The proposition that psychopathology always takes form within a constitutive intersubjective context calls into question the very concept of psychodiagnosis (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993). What is diagnosed, from an intersubjective perspective, is not the patient’s
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psychological organization seen in isolation but the functioning of the entire therapeutic system. Similar considerations apply to the question of analyzability, which cannot be assessed on the basis of the patient’s psychological structures alone but must be recognized as a property of the patient‐analyst system‐the goodness of fit between what a particular patient most needs to have understood and what a particular analyst is capable of understanding.
Conflict Formation and the Dynamic Unconscious
The foregoing conceptualizations of development and pathogenesis are well illustrated by our formulation of the intersubjective origins of intrapsychic conflict:
The specific intersubjective contexts in which conflict takes form are those in which central affect states of the child cannot be integrated because they fail to evoke the requisite attuned responsiveness from the caregiving surround. Such unintegrated affect states become the source of lifelong inner conflict, because they are experienced as threats both to the person’s established psychological organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties. Thus affect‐dissociating defensive operations are called into play, which reappear in the analytic situation in the form of resistance….It is in the defensive walling off of central affect states, rooted in early derailments of affect integration, that the origins of what has traditionally been called the dynamic unconscious can be found.
(Stolorow et al., 1987, pp. 91‐92)
From this perspective, the dynamic unconscious is seen to consist not of repressed instinctual drive derivatives, but of affect states that have been defensively walled off because they evoked massive malattunement from the early surround. This defensive sequestering of central affective states, which attempts to protect against retraumatization, is a principal source of resistance in psychoanalytic treatment. We wish to emphasize that the shift from drives to affectivity as forming the basis for the dynamic unconscious is not merely a change in terminology. The regulation of affective experience is not a product of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms; it is a property of the child‐caregiver system of reciprocal mutual influence (Beebe, Jaffe, and Lachmann, 1992; Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). If we understand the dynamic unconscious as taking form within such a system, then it becomes apparent that the
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conscious and unconscious is always the product of a specific intersubjective context.1 This idea of a fluid boundary forming within an intersubjective system continues to apply beyond the period of childhood and is readily demonstrated in the psychoanalytic situation as well, wherein the patient’s resistance can be seen to fluctuate in concert with perceptions of the analyst’s varying receptivity and attunement to the patient’s emotional experience.
Transference and Countertransference
Our intersubjective view of conflict formation has been incorporated into our conceptualization of two basic dimensions of transference (or two broad classes of unconscious organizing principles) (Stolorow et al., 1987). In one, which we term the development, or following Kohut (1984), the selfobject dimension, the patient longs for the analyst to provide development enhancing experiences that were missing or insufficient during the formative years. In the other, called the repetitive dimension, which object relations theorists have attempted to capture metaphorically with such terms as “internal objects” and “internalized object relations,” and which is a source of conflict and resistance, the patient expects and fears a repetition with the analyst of early experiences of developmental failure.
These two dimensions continually oscillate between the experiential foreground and background of the transference in concert with perceptions of the analyst’s varying attunement to the patient’s emotional states and needs (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). For example, when the analyst is experienced as malattuned, foreshadowing a traumatic repetition of early developmental failure, the conflictual and resistive dimension is frequently brought into the foreground, while the patient’s developmental yearnings are driven into hiding. On the other hand, when the analyst is able to analyze accurately the patient’s experience of rupture of the therapeutic bond, demonstrating an understanding of the patient’s reactive affect states and the principles that organize them, the developmental dimension becomes restored and strengthened, and the conflictual/resistive/repetitive dimension tends to recede, for the time being, into the background. Alternatively, at other times, the patient’s experience of the analyst’s understanding may heighten the conflictual and resistive aspect of the transference because it stirs the patient’s walled‐off
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longings and archaic hopes, along with dread of the retraumatization that the patient fears will follow from the exposure of these longings and hopes to the analyst. In still other circumstances, it is the repetitive dimension of the transference that is resisted because the patient fears that its articulation will jeopardize a precariously established and urgently needed selfobject tie to the analyst. For us, the essence of transference analysis lies in the investigative and interpretive tracking of these and other shifting figure‐ground relationships among the various dimensions of the transference as they take form within the ongoing intersubjective system constituted by the patient’s and analyst’s interacting worlds
of experience.
The foregoing description of the shifting figure‐ground relationships among dimensions of the transference applies not only to the patient’s transference but also to the analyst’s transference, usually termed countertransference. The larger system formed by the interplay between transference and countertransference is a prime example of what we call an intersubjective field or context. Transference and countertransference together form an intersubjective system of reciprocal mutual influence.
From the continual interplay between the patient’s and analyst’s psychological worlds two basic situations repeatedly arise: intersubjective conjunction and intersubjective disjunction (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). The first of these is illustrated by instances in which the principles organizing the patient’s experiences give rise to expressions that are assimilated into closely similar central configurations in the psychological life of the analyst. Disjunction, by contrast, occurs when the analyst assimilates the material expressed by the patient into configurations that significantly alter its meaning for the patient. Repetitive occurrences of intersubjective conjunction and disjunction are inevitable accompaniments of the therapeutic process and reflect the interactions of differently organized subjective worlds.
When the analyst is able to become reflectively aware of the principles organizing his or her experience of the therapeutic relationship, then the correspondence or disparity between the subjective worlds of patient and analyst can be used to promote empathic understanding and insight. In the absence of reflective self‐awareness on the part of the analyst, such conjunctions and disjunctions can seriously impede the progress of an analysis. When the principles
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unconsciously organizing the experiences of patient and analyst in an impasse are successfully investigated and illuminated, however, we have found that such analysis can transform a therapeutic stalemate into a royal road to new analytic understandings for both patient and analyst (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
The therapeutic action of psychoanalytic interpretation is something that takes form within a specific intersubjective interaction, to which the psychological organizations of both analyst and patient make distinctive contributions. The analyst, with an awareness of his or her own personal organizing principles and their codetermining impact on the course of the therapeutic relationship, contructs, through sustained empathic inquiry, an interpretation of the meaning of the patient’s experience that enables the patient to feel deeply understood. The patient, from within the depths of his or her own subjective world, weaves that experience of being understood into the tapestry of unique mobilized developmental yearnings, permitting a thwarted developmental process to become reinstated and new organizing principles to take root. Psychoanalytic interpretations thus derive their mutative power from the intersubjective matrix in which they crystallize (Stolorow, 1994).
Some Technical Implications
Psychoanalytic theories that postulate universal psychodynamic contents also tend to prescribe rigid rules of therapeutic technique or style that follow from the theoretical presuppositions. Freudian drive theory, for example, prescribes for the analyst a “rule of abstinence.” The more general and encompassing nature of intersubjectivity theory, by contrast, allows for much greater flexibility, so long as the analyst consistently investigates the impact of his or her own techniques, style, and theoretical assumptions on the patient’s experience and on the course of the therapeutic process. This greater flexibility frees analysts to explore new modes of intervention and to discover hitherto unarticulated dimensions of personal experience.
The doctrine of intrapsychic determinism and corresponding focus on the isolated mind in psychoanalysis has historically been associated with an objectivist epistemology. Such a position envisions the mind in isolation, radically estranged from an external reality that it either accurately apprehends or distorts. Analysts embracing
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an objectivist epistemology presume to have privileged access to the essence of the patient’s psychic reality and to the objective truths that the patient’s psychic reality obscures. In contrast, the intersubjective viewpoint, emphasizing the constitutive interplay between worlds of experience, leads inevitably to an epistemological stance that is best characterized as “perspectivalist” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992; Orange, 1994). Such a stance does not presume either that the analyst’s subjective reality is more true than the patient’s, or that the analyst can directly know the subjective reality of the patient; the analyst can only approximate the patient’s psychic reality from within the particularized scope of the analyst’s own perspective. A perspectivalist stance has a profound impact on the ambiance of the analytic situation, in that it is grounded in respect for the personal realities of both participants. Liberated from the need to justify and defend their experiences, both patient and analyst are freed to understand themselves, each other, and their ongoing relationship with increasing depth and richness.
Some Common Misunderstandings
In order to bring the assumptions underlying our theoretical framework more sharply into view, we close with a discussion of four common misunderstandings of the intersubjective perspective that we have encountered in dialogues with students and colleagues (Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandchaft, 1994).
1. The misunderstanding based on the fear of structureless chaos. The first misunderstanding involves a reading of our work as containing a claim that there is no psychic structure, pattern, or organization of personality that does not derive entirely from immediate, ongoing interactions with other people. Our vision of the individual person is thus seen as a portrait of an essentially formless void, radically vulnerable to and dependent on the shaping influence of events occurring in the interpersonal milieu. This misreading, exemplified by one critic’s characterization of our book Contexts of Being (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992) as promoting a “myth of the structureless mind,” fails to take into account the organizing activity that the individual contributes to every intersubjective field in which he or she participates. Here intersubjectivity theory is being interpreted as destroying the basis for concepts of
character, psychic continuity, the ‐ 188 ‐
achievement of regulatory capacities, and the development of complex psychological organizations. This misreading and criticism arise, we believe, because of a commitment on the part of such critics to what we have called the myth of the isolated mind (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). Within the thinking of theorists of the isolated mind, the stability of character and of self‐experience becomes reified as a property of a mind or psyche having internal structures that exist separately from the embeddedness of experience in constitutive intersubjective fields. It is as if the isolated‐mind theorist cannot imagine a stable character or psychological organization unless it is pictured inside a spatialized mental apparatus or perhaps even inside the physical boundaries of the cranium. Intersubjectivity theory, which specifically dispenses with all such ideas, thus raises the specter for these theorists of falling into structureless chaos.
This misunderstanding involves an interpretation of what we call a constitutive intersubjective field as an all‐determining interpersonal milieu in which the individual is totally the product of interactions with others. Again, this interpretation ignores the contribution of that individual to each intersubjective transaction that occurs. Intersubjective fields are, by definition, codetermined and thus cocreated.
Let us consider in this connection the analytic dyad. According to the older, classical traditions in psychoanalysis, psychological structure and the processes and mechanisms of psychopathology are located inside the patient’s mind. This isolating focus of the classical perspective fails to do justice to every individual’s irreducible engagement with others and blinds psychoanalytic clinicians to the specific ways they are implicated in the phenomena they observe and seek to treat. The intersubjectively oriented analyst, by contrast, while committed to illuminating the unconscious organizing principles the patient brings to the analytic encounter, also understands that the psychopathological phenomena that are seen to unfold do so within an intersubjective field that includes the analyst as a codetermining influence.
A variant of the misunderstanding based on the fear of structureless chaos appears in a similarly mistaken conception of our view of the process of psychological development. Here our standpoint becomes confused with a naive environmentalism according to
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which the child’s psychological growth is interpreted as entirely the product of the shaping influence of external interpersonal events. The intersubjective view of psychological development embraces what Wallace (1985) terms “intersectional causation.” At any stage the child’s formative experiences are understood to emerge from the intersection of, and to be codetermined by, his or her psychological organization as it has evolved to that point and specific features of the caregiving surround. In this model, the development of the child’s psychological organization is always seen as an aspect of an evolving and maturing child‐caregiver system.
2. The misunderstanding based on the fear of surrendering one’s personal reality. The second misunderstanding concerns the epistemological stance of intersubjectivity theory and the problem of truth and reality. As we have said, a defining feature of our thinking lies in our not assigning any greater intrinsic validity to the analyst’s world of reality than to the patient’s. This is in contrast to an objectivist epistemology that posits an objective external world, a true world to which the analyst is presumed to have access. Corresponding to this latter stance, a goal of treatment inevitably materializes involving the bringing of the patient’s experiences into alignment with that objective reality. Such a goal appears in the notion of correcting transference distortions.
The misreading we are discussing here is the interpretation of our refraining from granting absolute validity to the analyst’s reality and not to the patient’s as somehow containing an injunction to analysts not to have a theoretical framework to order clinical data. It appears that our critics on this point cannot envision holding to their theoretical ideas without conferring upon those ideas an absolute validity, or at least a greater measure of truth than is ascribed to the patient’s ideas. The specter here is of losing a grip on any assumptions at all, of the dissolution of the analyst’s personal reality, leaving the analyst adrift in a sea of uncertainty, perhaps in danger of being swept into the vortex of the patient’s psychological world. A key distinction lost in this misunderstanding is that between holding an assumption or belief and elevating that assumption to the status of an ultimate, objective truth. Once such an elevation has taken place, the belief necessarily escapes the perimeter of what can be analytically reflected upon. Intersubjectivity theory contains a commitment to examining and analytically reflecting upon the impact of
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the analyst and his or her theories, as well as that of the patient’s organizing principles, on the analytic process. This means that there can be no belief or idea that in principle escapes the field of potential analytic investigation, even including the ideas of intersubjectivity theory itself (see Atwood and Stolorow, 1993).
3. The misunderstanding based on the fear of an annihilating ad hominem attack. The third misunderstanding pertains to our tendency to explore the formative psychological background of various ideas we discuss and criticize. An objection is sometimes raised on our analysis of the myth of the isolated mind, because of our focus of this doctrine as a symbol of alienated self‐experience (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). We argued that the image of the isolated mind is a genuine myth in the sense of being a symbol of pervasive cultural experiences involving an alienation of the person from the physical world, from social life and engagement with others, and from the nature of subjectivity itself. We suggested further that this alienation exists for the purpose of disavowing a set of specific vulnerabilities that are in our time otherwise felt as unbearable. This discussion of alienation and the need to disavow vulnerability is not intended as an attack on theoretical viewpoints that embody the myth of the isolated mind; it is rather an attempt to explain why it is that an idea that has so manifestly hindered the development of psychoanalysis could nevertheless have maintained such a tenacious hold on thinkers in our field.
An ad hominem argument is one that seeks to dispose of a proposition or idea by pointing at the individual who espouses it. It would be an example of such a fallacious argument if we were maintaining that doctrines incorporating the idea of the isolated mind ought to be rejected simply because of the personal alienation and evasions of anguish shown by those who promulgate them. Clearly the value of a psychological or philosophical system needs to be assessed in relation to issues and traditions larger than the personal characteristics and events in a thinker’s life. The separation of the life out of which an idea originates and that idea itself is, however, not as clean as one might think in a discipline concerned with illuminating subjectivity; in fact, we view the total isolation of the personal context of origin from assessments of value and validity as still another manifestation of the alienation afflicting our field. We (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979) have addressed this issue as follows:
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It would be incorrect to view an explication of the personal realities embedded in psychological theories as giving no more than an account of the conditions of their genesis. Every [such] analysis delimits, in content as well as origin, the view being studied. It seeks not only to establish a relationship between the theorist and his works, but also to determine the particularization of scope of the theory, and hence to delimit its generality and validity. (pp. 22‐23).
Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory (1993) discusses the ways in which theories of personality symbolically crystallize central dimensions of the personal subjective world of the theorist, and the critical importance of the study of such relationships to the further development of personality theory. The concept of intersubjectivity was clearly implicit in the studies described in this work in that they pictured various theories as, on the one hand, reflecting the empirical domain of human experience to which they were addressed (more or less adequately) and, on the other hand, as also reflecting the psychological organization of the theorist. This is a prime example of what is meant by the idea of intersubjectivity.
4. The misunderstanding based on the fear of anarchy in the analytic relationship. The fourth misunderstanding pertains to the implications of intersubjectivity theory for the conduct of psychoanalytic treatment. A cardinal feature of the intersubjective perspective is the view of the analytic relationship in terms of an interaction between the subjective worlds of analyst and patient. The parity we ascribe to the worlds of patient and analyst at the level of abstract conceptualization of the therapeutic dyad becomes, however, misinterpreted as implying symmetry in that relationship at the level of concrete clinical practice. Here the authority ordinarily assumed by the analyst collapses, as the patient is thought to acquire a voice equal to that of the analyst in setting the conditions of the treatment. The theoretical vision of interacting subjective worlds thus becomes transposed into a picture of the decisions affecting the patient’s treatment being made on an egalitarian, democratic basis. The ultimate extreme of this overly concrete misinterpretation of intersubjectivity theory is the loss of the very distinction between patient and analyst. If the worlds of both participants are fully engaged in the analytic process, it is said, then what is left to tell us which of the two is the patient? If the life themes structuring the analyst’s world need to be constantly borne in mind as they impact on
the therapeutic process, ‐ 192 ‐
it is asked, whose analysis is it anyway? The disciplined practice of psychoanalytic treatment thereby threatens to dissolve into confusion and anarchy.
It seems to us that these misunderstandings arise because of an insufficiently abstract interpretation of the principles of intersubjectivity theory. The intersubjective perspective contains few concrete recommendations as to technique or style in the practice of psychoanalytic therapy; indeed, it is a perspective intended to be broad enough to accommodate a wide range of therapeutic styles and techniques, so long as the meanings and impact on the treatment process of these various approaches are made a focus of analytic investigation and reflection. The authority of the analyst is not comprised in any way by the adopting of an intersubjective standpoint, nor does this perspective necessarily introduce any confusion into the analytic dyad as to which participant is the patient. The asymmetry between analyst and patient seems to us to inhere in the very definition of a professional therapeutic relationship. The interacting meanings of this inherent asymmetry for the patient and the analyst may, of course, represent an important focus of analytic inquiry in the therapeutic dialogue.
Note
1 In addition to the prereflective and the dynamic unconscious, we have described a third intersubjectively derived form of unconsciousness‐the unvalidated unconscious: experiences that could not be consciously articulated because they never evoked validating responsiveness from the surround (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
Acknowledgment
This article contains material previously published in Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life, by R. Stolorow and G. Atwood (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1992), and in The Intersubjective Perspective, edited by R. Stolorow, G. Atwood, and B. Brandchaft (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994). We thank the publishers for giving us permission to reuse this material.
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RUNNING HEAD: DIALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis
Alex Gillespie1 Department of Psychology University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA UK Tel: + 44 (0) 1786 466841 alex.gillespie@stir.ac.uk Flora Cornish School of Health Glasgow Caledonian University Glasgow G4 0BA UK
The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity
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Awakening to Wholeness: Aikido as an Embodied Praxis of Intersubjectivity
2019
As a lifelong practitioner of Aikido, known as the ‘Art of Peace,’ the author reflects on how cultivating one’s ‘mind and body coordination’ through this defensive art develops embodied non-dissention. This principle is expressed and observed through calmer, more harmonious interaction with others and one’s entire life sphere. A non-competitive art that emerged in modern Japan from the deep spiritual values of its founder, Morihei Ueshiba (O Sensei) Aikido teaches one to blend with an attacker’s movements and ki (‘life force’ or ‘energy’). In the context of moving from ‘first person’ to ‘second-person’ contemplative education practices, this chapter explores through the lens of Aikido the implications of intersubjectivity as a double-bind paradox: How can dualistic consciousness of subject-object dichotomy apply itself to resolving human conflicts while inherently operating from a position of dualism that creates such conflict in the first place? Put yet another way, if one inhabits a dualistic consciousness regarding ‘other’ subject-objects then by the logic of such consciousness, one cannot be intersubjective, and hence, one cannot practice non-dissention. Reflections from Aikido pedagogy and training offer a transformative approach to relationality, one that offers contemplative education a model by which to transcend the habitual conditioning of subject-subject consciousness toward peaceful dialogic interconnectedness. The contention is that contemplative education practices in this way approach more engaged—and not split—intersubjectivity. Through a series of vignettes and explication, the author presents Aikido as a contemplative way of being and living that demands an intersubjective, second-person model of engagement. Thus, this model is based on the view of cosmos as interdependent relationality.
SELF-TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH SHARED SUFFERING : AN INTERSUBJECTIVE THEORY OF COMPASSION
2016
The value of compassion has often been appraised in terms of its benefits to the recipient, or its contribution to civil society. Less attention has been paid to the positive effect it may have upon the protagonists themselves, partly because compassion ostensibly appears to involve mainly dysphoric emotions (i.e., sharing another’s suffering). However, driven by the question of why traditions such as Buddhism and Christianity esteem compassion so highly, in this article, a theory of compassion is proposed that focuses on its transformative potential. In particular, I argue that compassion inherently involves a process of self-transcendence, enabling people to enter into an intersubjective state of selfhood. Drawing on Buddhist and Christian ideas, I then suggest that this intersubjective state is not only an antidote to the protagonists’ own suffering, but can accelerate their psychospiritual development. Thus, the article offers a new perspective on compassion that allows us to fully appreciate its transpersonal and transformative potential.
Intersubjectivity as an antidote to stress: Using dyadic active inference model of intersubjectivity to predict the efficacy of parenting interventions in reducing stress—through the lens of dependent origination in Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy
2022
Intersubjectivity refers to one person’s awareness in relation to another person’s awareness. It is key to well-being and human development. From infancy to adulthood, human interactions ceaselessly contribute to the flourishing or impairment of intersubjectivity. In this work, we first describe intersubjectivity as a hallmark of quality dyadic processes. Then, using parent-child relationship as an example, we propose a dyadic active inference model to elucidate an inverse relation between stress and intersubjectivity. We postulate that impaired intersubjectivity is a manifestation of underlying problems of deficient relational benevolence, misattributing another person’s intentions (over-mentalizing), and neglecting the effects of one’s own actions on the other person (under-coupling). These problems can exacerbate stress due to excessive variational free energy in a person’s active inference engine when that person feels threatened and holds on to his/her invalid (mis)beliefs. In support of this dyadic model, we briefly describe relevant neuroimaging literature to elucidate brain networks underlying the effects of an intersubjectivity-oriented parenting intervention on parenting stress. Using the active inference dyadic model, we identified critical interventional strategies necessary to rectify these problems and hereby developed a coding system in reference to these strategies. In a theory-guided quantitative review, we used this coding system to code 35 clinical trials of parenting interventions published between 2016 and 2020, based on PubMed database, to predict their efficacy for reducing parenting stress. The results of this theory-guided analysis corroborated our hypothesis that parenting intervention can effectively reduce parenting stress if the intervention is designed to mitigate the problems of deficient relational benevolence, under-coupling, and over-mentalizing. We integrated our work with several dyadic concepts identified in the literature. Finally, inspired by Arya Nagarjuna’s Buddhist Madhyamaka Philosophy, we described abstract expressions of Dependent Origination as a relational worldview to reflect on the normality, impairment, and rehabilitation of intersubjectivity.
Meditation Effects in the Social Domain: Self-Other Connectedness as a General Mechanism?
2014
Recent theories and findings in psychology and neuroscience suggest that self and other are interconnected, both on a conceptual and on a more basic bodily-affective representational level. Such self-other connectedness is supposed to be fundamental to empathy, social bonding and compassion. Meditation techniques – in particular mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation – have been found to foster these social capacities. Therefore, this contribution brings together both fields of research. In a first step, we examine self and other from the perspective of psychology and neuroscience, integrating findings from these fields into a dimension of mental functioning anchored to self-centeredness and self-other-connectedness, respectively. In a second step, we explore how mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation may act differentially upon this dimension. Finally, by referring to a recent experiment from our lab, it is illustrated how research hypotheses can be derived from this framework. Such investigations could help to comprehend meditation effects in the social domain, and more generally, further the scientific understanding of self and other.
Decentering the Self? Reduced Bias in Self- vs. Other-Related Processing in Long-Term Practitioners of Loving-Kindness Meditation
2016
TLDR
Preliminary evidence is provided that prolonged meditation practice may modulate self- vs. other-related processing, accompanied by an increase in compassion, which is needed to show if this is a direct outcome of loving-kindness meditation.
Abstract
Research in social neuroscience provides increasing evidence that self and other are interconnected, both on a conceptual and on an affective representational level. Moreover, the ability to recognize the other as “like the self” is thought to be essential for social phenomena like empathy and compassion. Meditation practices such as loving-kindness meditation (LKM) have been found to enhance these capacities. Therefore, we investigated whether LKM is associated to an increased integration of self–other-representations. As an indicator, we assessed the P300 event-related potential elicited by oddball stimuli of the self-face and a close other’s face in 12 long-term practitioners of LKM and 12 matched controls. In line with previous studies, the self elicited larger P300 amplitudes than close other. This effect was reduced in the meditation sample at parietal but not frontal midline sites. Within this group, smaller differences between self- and other-related P300 were associated with increasing meditation practice. Across groups, smaller P300 differences correlated with self-reported compassion. In meditators, we also investigated the effect of a short LKM compared to a control priming procedure in order to test whether the state induction would additionally modulate self- vs. other-related P300. However, no effect of the priming conditions was observed. Overall, our findings provide preliminary evidence that prolonged meditation practice may modulate self- vs. other-related processing, accompanied by an increase in compassion. Further evidence is needed, however, to show if this is a direct outcome of loving-kindness meditation.
Decentering the Self? Reduced Bias in Self- vs. Other-Related Processing in Long-Term Practitioners of Loving-Kindness Meditation.
In this paper, we start exploring the affective and ethical dimension of what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6:485–507, 2007) have called ‘participatory sense-making’. In the first part, we distinguish various ways in which we are, and feel, affectively inter-connected in interpersonal encounters. In the second part, we discuss the ethical character of this affective inter-connectedness, as well as the implications that taking an ‘inter-(en)active approach’ has for ethical theory itself.
This paper is part of a paper series on the Buddhist Notion of Intersubjectivity, published in this journal from 2017 to 2019, guest-edited by Roy Tzohar and Jake Davis. Readers are recommended to view these papers in the following order:
Tzohar, R. 2017. ‘Imagine Being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity.’ Sophia, 56, 337–354;
Prueitt, C. 2018. ‘Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought.’ Sophia, 57, 313–335;
Kachru, S. 2019. ‘Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism.’ Sophia, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0707-8;
Garfield, J. L. ‘I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru.’ Sophia, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7.
“The Self-Effacing Buddhist: No(t)-Self in Early Buddhism and Contemplative Neuroscience.”
Verhaeghen, Paul.
Contemporary Buddhism 18 (2017): 21 – 36.
Essential Others on the Path to Enlightenment: The Importance of Intersubjectivity in the Visuddhimagga’s Presentation of Progress along the Path
Viewpoints which Matter 