An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition

(1990). Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7S(Supplement):33-46 An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D. This article formulates an object relations perspective based on the complementarity of intrapsychic and intersubjective aspects of self-development. Object relations theories, even those interested in intersubjectivity, have not followed up on Winnicott's (1971) crucial distinction between the subjectively conceived object and the objectively perceived, outside other. With few exceptions, notably Stern (1985), theorists have overlooked the core element of intersubjectivity, which is mutual recognition. The development of the capacity for mutual recognition can be conceived as a separate trajectory from the internationalization of object relations. The subject gradually becomes able to recognize the other person's subjectivity, developing the capacity for attunement and tolerance of difference. To elaborate on this process, the article discusses differentiation in the first 2 years of life. It suggests that Mahler's rapprochement period can be reinterpretated as a struggle for recognition in which the outcome is not simply object constancy, but the beginning ability to recognize another person's subjectivity. The differentiation process consists not merely of separation, but the continual breakdown and repair of mutuality in the psyche's stance toward the outside. Accepting the inevitability of breakdown and reconstruction of the outside other allows considerable room for the role of intrapsychic fantasy and aggression, which might otherwise be neglected in relational theories of the self. We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would … become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling … that he had an equivalent center of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (Eliot, 1871/1965, p. 243) ————————————— Requests for reprints should be sent to Jessica Benjamin, PhD, 228 West 22nd Street, New York, New York 10011. - 33 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. In recent years analysts from diverse psychoanalytic schools have converged in the effort to formulate relational theories of the self (Eagle, 1984; Mitchell, 1988). What these approaches share is the belief that the human mind is interactive rather than monadic, that the psychoanalytic process should be understood as occurring between subjects rather than within the individual (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984; Mitchell, 1988). Mental life is seen from an intersubjective perspective. Although this perspective has transformed both our theory and our practice in important ways, such transformations create new problems. A theory in which the individual subject no longer reigrs absolute must confront the difficulty that each subject has in recognizing the other as an equivalent center of experience (Benjamin, 1988). The problem of recognizing the other emerges the moment we consider that troublesome legacy of intrapsychic theory, the term object. In the original usage, still common in self psychology and object relatiors theories, the corcept of object relations refers to the psychic internalization and representation of interactions between self and objects. Although such theories ascribe a considerable role to the early environment and parental objects—in short, “real” others—they have only taken us to the point of recognizing that “where ego is, objects must be.” So, for example, neither Fairbairn's (1952) insistence on the need for the whole object nor Kohut's (1977) declaration that selfobjects remain important throughout life addresses directly the difference between object and other. Perhaps the elision between real other and their internal representation is so widely tolerated because the epistemological question of what is reality and what is representation appears to us, in our justifiable humility, too ecumenical and lofty for our parochial craft. Or perhaps, as psychoanalysts, the question of reality does not really trouble us. But the unfortunate tendency to collapse other subjects into objects cannot simply be ascribed to this irresoluteness with regard to reality. Nor can it be dismissed as a terminological embarrassment, that could be dissolved by greater linguistic precision (see Kohut, 1984). Rather, it is a symptom of the very problems in psychoanalysis that a relational theory should aim to cure. The inquiry into the intersubjective dimension of the analytic encounter would aim to change our theory and practice so that “where objects were, subjects must be.” What does such a change mean? A beginning has been made with the introduction of the term intersubjectivity for the analytic situation (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984; Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987), defining intersubjectivity as the field of intersection between two subjectivities, the interplay between two different subjective worlds. But how is the meeting of two subjects different from that in which a subject meets object? Once we have acknowledged that the object makes an important contribution to the life of the subject, what is added by deciding to call this object another subject? And what are the impediments to the meeting of two minds? - 34 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. To begin this inquiry, we must address this question: What difference does the other make, the other who is truly perceived as outside, as distinct from our mental field of operations? Isn't there a dramatic difference between the experience with the other perceived as outside the self and the subjectively conceived object? Winnicott (1971) formulated the basic outlines of this distinction in what may well be considered his most daring and radical statement, “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications.” Since then, with a few exceptions (Eigen, 1981; Ghent, 1989; Modell, 1984) there has been little effort to elaborate Winnicott's juxtaposition of the two possible relationships to the object. Yet, as I show, the difference between the other as subject and the other as object is crucial for a relational psychoanalysis. The distinction between the two types of relationships to the other can emerge clearly only if we acknowledge that both are endemic to psychic experience and hence both valid areas of psychoanalytic knowledge. If there is a contradiction between the two modes of experience, then we ought to probe it as a condition of knowledge rather than assume it to be a fork in the road. Other theoretical grids that have bifurcated psychoanalytic thought —drive theory versus object relations theory, ego versus id psychology, intrapsychic versus interpersonal theory—insisted on a choice between the two opposing perspectives. I am proposing, instead, that the two dimensions of experience with the object/other are complementary even though they sometimes stand in an oppositional relationship. By encompassing both dimensionst, we can fulfill the intention of relational theories: to account both for the pervasive effects of human relationships on psychic development and for the equally ubiquitous effects of internal psychic mechanisms and fantasies in shaping psychological life and interaction. I refer to the two categories of experience as the intrapsychic and the intersubjective dimensions (Benjamin, 1988). The idea of intersubjectivity, which has been brought into psychoanalysis from philosophy (Habermas, 1970, 1971), is useful because it specifically addresses the problem of defining the other as object. Intersubjectivity was deliberately formulated in contrast to the logic of subject and object that predominates in Western philosophy and science. It refers to that zone of experience or theory in which the other is not merely the object of the ego's need/drive or cognition/perception, but has a separate and equivalent center of self. Intersubjective theory postulates that the other must be recognized as another subject in order for the self to fully experience his or her subjectivity in the other's presence. This means, first, that we have a need for recognition and second, that we have a capacity to recognize others in return—mutual recognition. But recognition is a capacity of individual development that is only unevenly realized. In a sense, the point of a relational psychoanalysis is to explain this fact. In Freudian metapsychology, the process of recognizing the other “with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling” would - 35 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. appear, at best, as a background effect of the relationship between ego and external reality. My purpose is to bring the process of recognition into the foreground of our thinking. I suggest some preliminary outlines of the development of the capacity for recognition. In particular I focus on separation-individuation theory, showing how much more it can reveal when it is viewed through the intersubjective lens, especially in light of the contributions of both Stern and Winnicott. Because separation-individuation theory is formulated in terms of ego and object, it does not fully realize its own contribution. In the ego-object perspective, the child is the individual, seen as moving in a progression toward autonomy and separateness. The telos of this process is the creation of psychic structure through internalization of the object in the service of greater independence. As a result, separation-individuation theory focuses on the structural residue of the child's interaction with the mother as object; it leaves the aspects of engagement, connection and active assertion that occur with the mother as other in the unexamined background. This perspective is infantocentric, unconcerned with the source of the mother's responses, which reflect not only pathology or health (“narcissistic” versus good enough) but also her necessarily independent subjectivity. It also misses the pleasure of the evolving relationship with a partner from whom one knows how to elicit a response, but whose responses are not entirely predictable and assimilable to internal fantasy. The idea of pleasure was lost when ego psychology put the id on the backburner, but it might be restored by recognizing the subjectivity of the other. An intersubjective perspective helps to transcend the infantocentric viewpoint of intrapsychic theory by asking how a person becomes capable of enjoying recognition with an other. Logically, recognizing the parent as subject cannot simply be the result of internalizing them qua mental object. This is a developmental process that has barely begun to be explicated. How does a child develop into a person who, as a parent, is able to recognize her or his own child? What are the internal processes, the psychic landmarks, of such development? Where is the theory that tracks the development of the child's responsiveness, empathy, and concern, and not just the parent's sufficiency or failure? It is in regard to these questions that most theories of the self have fallen short. Even self psychology, which has placed such emphasis on attunement and empathy, which has focused on the intersubjectivity of the analytic encounter, has been tacitly one sided in its understanding of the parent-child relationship and the development of intersubjective relatedness. Perhaps in reaction against the oedipal reality principle, Kohut (1977, 1984) defined the necessary confrontation with the other's needs or with limits in a selfreferential way—optimal failures in empathy (parallel to analysts' errors)— as if there were nothing for children to learn about the other's rights or feelings. Although the goal was to enable individuals to open “new channels of empathy” - 36 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. and “in-tuneness between self and selfobject” (1984, p. 66), the self was always the recipient, not the giver of empathy. The responsiveness of the selfobject, by definition, serves the function of “shoring up our self” throughout life; but at what point does it become the responsiveness of the outside other whom we love? The occasionally mentioned (perhaps more frequently assumed) “love object,” who would presumably hold the place of outside other, has no articulated place in the theory. Thus, once again the pleasure in mutuality between two subjects is reduced to its function of stabilizing the self, not of enlarging our awareness of the outside, nor of recognizing others as animated by independent though similar feelings.1 In this article, I outline some crucial points in the development of recognition. It is certainly true that recognition begins with the other's confirming response that tells us that we have created meaning, had an impact, revealed an intention. But very early on we find that recognition between persons—understanding and being understood, being in attunement—begins to be an end in itself. Recognition between persons is essentially mutual. By our very enjoyment of the other's confirming response, we recognize her or him in return. I think that what the research on mother-infant interaction has uncovered about early reciprocity and mutual influence is best conceptualized as the development of the capacity for mutual recognition. The frame-byframe studies of face-to-face play at 3-4 months have given us a kind of early history of recognition. The pathbreaking work of Stern (1974, 1977, 1985) and the more recent contributions of Beebe (1985); (Beebe & Lachmann, 1988; Beebe & Stern, 1977) have illuminated how crucial the relationship of mutual influence is for early self-development. They have also shown that self-regulation is achieved at this point through regulating the other: I can change my own mental state by causing the other to be more or less stimulating. Mother's recognition is the basis for the baby's sense of agency. Equally important, although less emphasized, is the other side of this play interaction: The mother is dependent to some degree on the baby's recognition. A baby who is less responsive is a less “recognizing” baby, and the mother who reacts to her apathetic or fussy baby by overstimulating or withdrawing, is a mother feeling despair that the baby does not recognize her. In Stern's view, however, early play does not yet constitute intersubjective relatedness (1985). Rather, he designates the next phase, when affective attunement develops at 8 or 9 months, as intersubjectivity proper. This is the moment that we discover “there are other minds out there!” and that separate minds ————————————— 1 My remarks may be more apt for Kohut than self psychology as a whole, which has recently shown an impetus to correct this one-sidedness and to include the evolution of difference in relation to the other (e.g., Lachmann, 1986) as well as the relationship to the “true” object (Stolorow, 1986). - 37 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. can share a similar state. I would agree that this phase constitutes an advance in recognition of the other, but I think the earlier interaction can be considered an antecedent, in the form of concrete affective sharing. Certainly, from the standpoint of the mother whose infant returns her smile, this is already the beginning of reciprocal recognition. Therefore rather than designate the later phase exclusively as intersubjective relatedness, I would rather conceptualize a development of intersubjectivity in which there are key moments of transformation. In this phase, as Stern (1985) emphasized, the new thing is the sharing of the inner world. The infant begins to check out how the parent feels when he or she is discovering a new toy and the parent demonstrates attunement by responding in another medium. By translating the same affective level into another modality (e.g., from kinetic to vocal) the adult conveys the crucial fact that it is the inner experience that is congruent. The difference in form makes the element of similarity or sharing clear. I would add that the parent is not literally sharing the same state, because the parent is (usually) excited by the infant's reaction, not the toy itself. The parent is in fact taking pleasure in contacting the child's mind. This is a good point to consider the contrast between intersubjective theory and ego psychology, a contrast that Stern made much of. The phase of discovering other minds coincides roughly with Mahler's differertiation and practicing, but there is an important difference in emphasis. In the intersubjective view, the infant's greater separation, which Mahler emphasizes in this perioc, actually proceeds in tandem with, and enhances the felt connection with, the other. The joy of intersubjective attunement is: This other can share my feeling. According to Mahler (see Mahler et al., 1975), though, the infant of 10 months is primarily involved in exploring, in the “love affair with the world.” The checking back to look at mother is not about sharing the experience, but about safety/anxiety issues, “refueling.” It is a phase in which Mahler sees the mother not as contacting the child's mind, but giving him a push from the next. Although Stern emphasized his differences with Mahler, I think the two models are complementary, not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that intersubjective theory amplifies separation-individuation theory at this point by focusing on the affective exchange between parent and child and by stressing the simultaneity of connection and separation. Instead of opposite endpoints of a longitudinal trajectory, connection and separation form a tension, which requires the equal magnetism of both sides. Now it is this tension between connection and separation that I suggest we track beyond the period of affective attunement. If we follow it into the 2nd. year of life, we can see a tension developing between assertion of self and recognition of the other. Translating Mahler's rapprochement crisis into the terms of intersubjectivity, we can say that in this crisis the tension between asserting self and recognizing the other breaks down and is manifested as a conflict between self and other. - 38 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. My analysis of this crisis derives, in part, from philosophy, from Hegel's formulation of the problem of recognition in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807/1952). In his discussion of the conflict between “the independence and dependence of self-consciousness” Hegel showed how the self's wish for absolute independence conflicts with the self's need for recognition. In trying to establish itself as an independent entity, the self must yet recognize the other as a subject like itself in order to be recognized by it. This immediately compromises the self's absoluteness and poses the problem that the other could be equally absolute and independent. Each self wants to be recognized and yet to maintain its absolute identity: The self says, “I want to affect you, but I want nothing you do or say to affect me, I am who I am.” In its encounter with the other, the self wishes to affirm its absolute independence, even though its need for the other and the other's similar wish give the lie to it. This description of the self's absoluteness covers approximately the same territory as narcissism in Freudian theory, particularly its manifestation as omnipotence: The insistence on being one (everyone is identical to me) and all alone (there is nothing outside of me that I do not control). Freud's (1911, 1915) conception of the earliest ego with its hostility to the outside, or its incorporation of everything good into itself is not unlike Hegel's absolute self. Hegel's notion of the conflict between independence and dependence meshes with the classic psychoanalytic view in which the self does not wish to give up omnipotence. But even if we reject the Freudian view of the ego, the confrontation with the other's subjectivity and the limits of self-assertion is a difficult one to negotiate. The need for recognition entails this fundamental paradox: In the very moment of realizing our own independent will, we are dependent on another to recognize it. At the very moment we come to understanding the meaning of I, myself, we are forced to see the limitations of that self. At the moment when we understand that separate minds can share similar feelings, we begin to find out that these minds can also disagree. We return to Mahler's description of rapprochement, and see how it illustrates the paradox of recognition and how the infant is supposed to get out of it. Prior to rapprochement, in the self-assertion of the practicing phase, the infant still takes himself or herself for granted, and his or her mother as well. He or she does not make a sharp discrimination between doing things with mother's help and without it. The infant is too excited by what he or she is doing to reflect on who is doing it. Beginning about 14 months, a conflict emerges between the infant's grandiose aspirations and the perceived reality of his or her limitations and dependency. Although now able to do more, the toddler is aware of what she or he can't do and what she or he can't make mother do—for example, stay with her or him instead of going out. Many of the power struggles that begin here (wanting the whole pear, not a slice) can be summed up as a demand, “Recognize my intent!” The child will insist that mother share everything, participate in all her or his deeds, acquiesce to all - 39 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. her or his demands. The toddler is also up against the increased awareness of separateness, and consequently, of vulnerability: She or he can move away from mother, but mother can also move away from her or him. If we reframe this description from the intersubjective perspective, the infant now knows that different minds can feel differently, that he or she is dependent as well as independent. In this sense, rapprochement is the crisis of recognizing the other, specifically of confronting mother's independence. It is no accident that mother's leaving becomes a focal point here, for it confronts the child not only with separation but with her independent aims. For similar reasons, the mother may experience conflict at this point; the child's demands are now threatening, no longer simply needs, but expressions of his or her independent (tyrannical) will. The child is different from her mental fantasy, no longer her object. He or she may switch places with her: from passive to active. The child, not the mother, is now the repository of omnipotence she once attributed to the “good” all-giving mother. How she responds to her child depends on her ability to mitigate such fantasies with a sense of real agency and separate selfhood, on her confidence in her child's ability to survive conflict, loss, and imperfection. The mother has to be able both to set clear boundaries for her child and to recognize the child's will, to both insist on her own independence and respect that of the child—in short, to balance assertion and recognition. If mother and child fail to work out this balance together, omnipotence continues, attributed either to the mother or the self; in neither case can we say that the development of mutual recognition has been furthered. From the standpoint of intersubjective theory, the ideal resolution of the paradox of recognition is for it to continue as a constant tension between recognizing the other and asserting the self. However, in Mahler's theory the rapprochement conflict appears to be resolved through internalization, the achievement of object constancy—when the child can separate from mother or be angry at her and still be able to contact her presence or goodness. In a sense, this sets the goal of development too low: it is difficult and therefore sufficient for the child to accomplish the realistic integration of good and bad object representations (Kernberg, 1980). The sparse formulation of the end of the rapprochement conflict is, shall we say, anticlimactic, leaving us to wonder, is this all? In this picture, the child only has to accept mother's disappointing him or her, he or she does not begin to shift his or her center of gravity to recognize that mother does this because she has her own center. The breakdown and recreation of the tension between asserting one's own reality and accepting the other's is a neglected aspect of the crisis, but it is equally important. This aspect emerges when we superimpose Winnicott's (1971) idea of destroying the object over Mahler's rapprochement crisis. It is destruction—negation in Hegel's sense—which enables the subject to go beyond relating to the object through identification, projection, and other - 40 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. intrapsychic processes having to do with the subjectively conceived object. It enables the transition from relating (intrapsychic) to using the object, carrying on a relationship with an other who is objectively perceived as existing outside the self an entity in his or her own right. That is, in the mental act of negating or obliterating the object, which may be expressed in the real effort to attack the other, we find out whether the real other survives. If the other survives without retaliating or withdrawing under the attack, then we know him or her to exist outside ourselves, as not just our mental product. Winnicott's thesis suggests a basic tension between denial and affirmation of the other (between omnipotence and recognition of reality). Another way to understand the conflicts that occur in rapprochement is through the concepts of destruction and survival: The wish to absolutely assert the self and deny everything outside one's own mental omnipotence must sometimes crash against the implacable reality of the other. The collision Winnicott has in mind, however, is not one in which aggression occurs “reactive to the encounter with the reality principle,” but one in which aggression “creates the quality of externality” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 110). When the destructiveness damages neither the parent nor the self, external reality comes into view as a sharp, distinct contrast to the inner fantasy world. The outcome of this process is not simply reparation or restoration of the good object, but love, the sense of discovering the other (Eigen, 1981; Ghent, 1990). The flipside of Winnicott's analysis would be that when destruction is not countered with survival, when the other's reality does not come into view, a defensive process of internalization takes place. Aggression becomes a problem—how to dispose of the bad feeling. What cannot be worked through and dissolved with the outside other is transposed into a drama of internal objects. It shifts from the domain of the intersubjective into the domain of the intrapsychic. In real life, even when the other's response dissipates aggression, there is no perfect process of destruction and survival; there is always also internalization. All experience is elaborated intrapsychically, we might venture to say, but when the other does not survive and aggression is not dissipated, it becomes almost exclusively intrapsychic. It therefore seems to me fallacious to see internalization processes only as breakdown products or defenses; rather I see them as a kind of underlying substratum of our mental activity—a constant symbolic digestion process that constitutes an important part of the cycle of exchange between the individual and the outside. It is the loss of balance between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective, between fantasy and reality—that is the problem. Indeed, the problem in psychoanalytic theory has been that internalization—either the defensive or the structure-building aspects (depending on which object relations theory you favor) has obscured the component of destruction that Winnicott (1964, p. 62) emphasized: discovering “that fantasy and fact, both important, are nevertheless different from each other.” The - 41 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. complementarity of the intrapsychic and intersubjective modalities is important here: As Winnicott made clear, it is in contrast to the fantasy of destruction that the reality of survival is so satisfying and authentic. Winnicott thus offered a notion of a reality that can be loved, something beyond the integration of good and bad. Whereas the intrapsychic ego has reality imposed from the outside, the intersubjective ego discovers reality. This reality principle does not represent a detour to wish fulfillment, a modification of the pleasure principle. Nor is it the acceptance of a false life of adaptation. Rather, it is a continuation under more complex conditions of the infant's original fascination with and love of what is outside, his or her appreciation of difference and novelty. This appreciation is the element in differentiation that gives separation its positive, rather than simply hostile, coloring: love of the world, not merely leaving or distance from mother. To the extent that mother herself is placed outside, she can be loved; then separation is truly the other side of connection to the other. It is this appreciation of the other's reality that completes the picture of separation and explains what there is beyond internalization—the establishment of shared reality. First (1988) provided some very germaine observations of how the toddler does begin to apprehend mutuality as a concomitant of separateness, specifically in relation to the mother's leaving. The vehicle of this resolution is, expanding Winnicott's notion, cross identification: the capacity to put oneself in the place of the other based on empathic understanding of similarities of inner experience. The 2–year-old's initial role-playing imitation of the departing mother is characterized by the spirit of pure retaliation and reversal—“I'll do to you what you do to me.” But gradually the child begins to identify with the mother's subjective experience and realizes that “I could miss you as you miss me,” and, therefore, that “I know that you could wish to have your own life as I wish to have mine.” First showed how, by recognizing such shared experience, the child actually moves from a retaliatory world of control to a world of mutual understanding and shared feeling. This analysis adds to the idea of object constancy, in which the good object survives the bad experience, the idea of recognizing that the leaving mother is not bad but independent, a person like me. By accepting this, the child gains not only his or her own independence (as traditionally emphasized) but also the pleasure of shared understanding. Looking backward, we might trace the outlines of a developmental trajectory of intersubjective relatedness up to this point. Its core feature is recognizing similarity of inner experience in tandem with difference. We could say that it begins with “We are feeling this feeling,” and then moves to “I know that you, who are an other mind, share this same feeling.” In rapprochement, however, a crisis occurs as the child begins to confront difference—“You and I don't want or feel the same thing.” The initial response to this discovery is a breakdown of recognition between self and other: I insist on my way, I refuse - 42 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. to recognize you, I begin to try to coerce you; and therefore I experience your refusal as a reversal: you are coercing me. Here the capacity for mutual recognition must stretch to accomodate the tension of difference, the knowledge of conflicting feelings. In the 3rd year of life, this issue can emerge in symbolic play. Here, the early play at retaliatory reversal may be a kind of empowerment, where the child feels “I can do to you what you do to me.” But then the play expands to include the emotional identification with the other's position, and becomes reflexive so that, as First put it, “I know you know what I feel.” In this sense, the medium of shared feeling remains as important to intersubjectivity in later phases as in early ones. But it is now extended to symbolic understanding of feeling so that “You know what I feel, even when I want or feel the opposite of what you want or feel.” This advance in differentiation means that “We can share feelings without my fearing that my feelings are simply your feelings.” The child who can imaginatively entertain both roles—leaving and being left—begins to transcend the complementary form of the mother-child relationship. The complementary structure organizes the relationship of giver and taker, doer and done to, powerful and powerless. It allows you to reverse roles, but not to alter them. In the reversable relationship, each person can play only one role at a time: One person is recognized, the other person is negated; one subject, the other object. This complementarity does not dissolve omnipotence, but shifts it from one partner to the other. The movement out of the world of complementary power relations into the world of mutual understanding thus shows us an important step in the dismantling of omnipotence: Power is dissolved, rather than transferred back and forth in an endless cycle between child and mother. When mutual recognition is not restored, when shared reality does not survive destruction, then complementary structures and “relating” to the inner object predominate. Because this occurs commonly enough, the intrapsychic, subject-object concept of the mind actually fits with the dominant mode of internal experience. This is why, notwithstanding our intersubjective potential, the reversable complementarity of subject and object conceptualized by intrapsychic theory illuminates so much of the internal world. The principles of mind Freud first analyzed (e.g., the reversal of opposites, like active and passive, the exchangeability or displacement of objects) thus remain indispensr able guides to the inner world of objects. But even when the capacity for recognition is well developed, when the subject can use shared reality and receive the nourishment of “other-than-me substance,” the intrapsychic capacities remain. The mind's ability to manipulate, to displace, to reverse, to turn one thing into another is not a mere negation of reality, but the source of mental creativity. Furthermore, when things go well, complementarity is a step on the road to mutuality. The toddler's insistent reciprocity, his efforts to reverse the relationship with the - 43 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. mother, to play at feeding, grooming, and leaving her, is one step in the process of identification that ultimately leads to understanding. Thus “using” the other properly remains in counterpoint to “relating through identifications.” Using, that is recognizing, implies the capacity to transcend complementary structures, but not the absence of them. It does not mean the disappearance of fantasy or of negation but that “destruction becomes the unconscious backcloth for love of a real object” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 111). It means a balance of destruction with recognition. In the broadest sense, internal fantasy is always eating up or negating external reality—“While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.” (p. 106) The loved one is being continually destroyed but its survival means that we can eat our reality and have it too. From the intersubjective standpoint, all fantasy implies the negation of the real other, whether its content is negative or idealized. Just as, from the intrapsychic view, external reality is simply that which is internalized as fantasy. The ongoing interplay of destruction and recognition is a dialectic between fantasy and external reality. In the analytic process, the effort to share the productions of fantasy changes the status of fantasy itself, moving it from inner reality to intersubjective communication. The fantasy object, who is being related to or destroyed and the usable other, who is there to receive the communication and be loved, complement each other. What we find in the good hour is a momentary balance between intrapsychic and intersubjective dimensions, a sustained tension or rapid movement between the patient's experience of us as inner material and as the recognizing other. (This suspension of the conflict between the two experiences bears on the understanding of transitional space as well.) The opportunity to engage at both levels is, in part, what is therapeutic about the relationship. The restoration of balance between intrapsychic and intersubjective in the psychoanalytic process should not be construed as an adaptation that reduces fantasy to reality, but rather as practice in the sustaining of contradiction. When the tension of sustaining contradiction breaks down, as it frequently does, the intersubjective structures—mutuality, simultaneity, and paradox— are subordinated in favor of complementary structures. The breakdown of tension between self and other in favor of relating as subject and object is a common fact of mental life. But this breakdown cannot be accounted for or counteracted simply by adopting the ideal of balance, an idea of normalcy which decrees that breakdown reflects failure, and that the accompanying phenomena—internalization/fantasy/aggression—are pathological. If the clash of two wills is an inherent part of intersubjective relations, then no perfect environment can take the sting from the encounter with otherness. The question becomes how the inevitable elements of negation are processed. It is “good enough” that the inward movement of negating reality and creating fantasy should eventually be counterbalanced by an outward movement of recognizing - 44 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. the outside. To claim anything more for intersubjectivity would invite a triumph of the external, a terrifying psychic vacuity, an end to creativity altogether. A relational psychoanalysis should leave room for the messy, intrapsychic side of creativity and aggression; it is the contribution of the intersubjective view that may give these elements a more hopeful cast, showing destruction to be the other of recognition. References Atwood, G., & Stolorow, R. (1984). Structures of subjectivity. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Beebe, B. (1985). Mother-infant mutual influence and precursors of self and object representations. In J. Masling (Ed.), Empirical studies of psychoanalytic theories (Vol. 2, pp. 27-48). Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. [→] Beebe, B., & Lachmann, F. (1988). Mother-infant mutual influence and precursors of psychic structure. In A. Goldberg (Ed.), Frontiers in self psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 3-25). Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. [→] Beebe, B., & Stern, D. (1977). Engagement-disengagement and early object experiences. In N. Freedman & S. Grand (Eds.), Communicative structures and psychic structures. New York: Plenum. Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism and the problem of domination. New York: Pantheon. [→] Eagle, M. (1984). Recent developments in psychoanalysis: A critical evaluation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [→] Eigen, M. (1981). The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 62:413-433 [→] Eliot, G. (1965). Middlemarch Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1871) Fairbairn, R. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. [→] First, E. (1988). The leaving game: I'll play you and you'll play me: The emergence of the capcaity for dramatic role play in two-year-olds. In A. Slade & D. Wolfe (Eds.), Modes of meaning: Clinical and developmental approaches to symbolic play (pp. 132-160). New York: Oxford University Press. Freud, S. (1911). Formulation on the two principles in mental functioning. Standard Edition, 12, 213-226. [→] Freud, S. (1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. Standard Edition, 14, 11140. [→] Ghent, E. (1989). Credo—The Dialectics of One-Person and Two-Person Psychologies. Contemp. Psychoanal. 25:169-211 [→] Ghent, E. (1990). Masochism, Submission, Surrender—Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender. Contemp. Psychoanal. 26:108-136 [→] Habermas, J. (1970). A theory of communicative competence. In H. P. Dreitzel (Ed.), Recent sociology No. 2. New York: Macmillan. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and human interests. Boston: Beacon. Hegel, G. W. F. (1952). Phenomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. (Original work published 1807) Kernberg, O. (1980). Object relations theory and clinical psychoanalysis. New York: Aronson. [→] Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press. Kohut, H. (1984). How does analysis cure? 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The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books. [→] Stolorow, R. (1986). On experiencing an object: A multidimensional perspective. In A. Goldberg (Ed.), Progress in self psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 273-279). New York: Guilford. [→] Stolorow, R., Brandchaft, B., & Atwood, G. (1987). Psychoanalytic treatment: An intersubjective approach. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. [→] Winnicott, D. W. (1964). The child, the family and the outside world. Harmondsworth, U.K: Penguin. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). The use of an object and relating through identifications. In Playing and reality. London: Tavistock. [→] - 46 - Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWeb. Article Citation [Who Cited This?] Benjamin, J. (1990). An Outline of Intersubjectivity. Psychoanal. Psychol., 7S(Supplement):33-46 Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. 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