This article was downloaded by: [Georgian Court University]

On: 06 March 2015, At: 22:19

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer
House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

International Forum of Psychoanalysis

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/spsy20

The intersubjective: A core concept for

psychoanalysis
Alejandro Ávila
Published online: 07 Nov 2014.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Alejandro Ávila (2014): The intersubjective: A core concept for psychoanalysis, International Forum of
Psychoanalysis, DOI: 10.1080/0803706X.2014.967813

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2014.967813

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained
in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of
the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied
upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall
not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other
liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2014.967813

The intersubjective: A core concept for psychoanalysis†

ALEJANDRO ÁVILA*

Abstract
The history of psychoanalysis has developed along two main routes: metapsychological (drive theory) and relational.
So-called “relational psychoanalysis” derives from the convergence of several traditions – interpersonal and sociocultural
(Sullivan, Fromm), object relations theory (Fairbairn), self psychology (Hokut), and intersubjective systems theory
(Stolorow, Atwood, Orange) – enriched along many decades by a variety of strong contributions from Ferenczi to
independent thinkers such as Bion, Winnicott, Bowlby, Pichon Rivière, W. and M. Baranger, J. Sandler, Ogden, and
Bollas, among many others. Facing its main controversies in terms of theory, present psychoanalysis evolves between
heuristic versus hermeneutic, intrapsychic versus intersubjective, fantasy versus trauma, conflict versus deficit, and drives
Downloaded by [Georgian Court University] at 22:19 06 March 2015

versus motivational systems. Controversies in technique have also evolved from a neutrality and abstinence model to an
optimal provision and frustration model experienced in mutuality but ethically balanced. This paper displays the main
concepts of the relational perspective, in which intersubjectivity is both a constitutive frame for human beings and the
essential way for change. Developments from infant research and neuroscience – and the deep social and cultural changes
facing twenty-first century societies – promote a new scene for today’s psychoanalysis in convergence with these relational
proposals.

Key words: intersubjective systems theory, relational psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity

What are theories for? We need them to justify our
practice by articulating, in the form of thoughts, that
which we do not sufficiently understand. The com-
plexity of human experience, the paradigm of what
will never be understood completely, constitutes a
privileged ground for endless theoretical develop-
ments aiming to cover the knowledge gaps that
science fails to fill. Theory is a figuration that serves
to justify interventions, via pseudo-validation. Past
interventions that may seem aberrant in the light of
modern knowledge were justified by the theories of
their time; and then we forgive them as the product
of a given society, its values, and culture. At the
same time, we, as professionals, join schools that
confer identity and historical roots in order to bridge
those gaps between knowledge and practice. These
affiliations, acquired during our years of training,
and our other groups of belonging, help us to escape
the difficulties involved in direct knowledge, in our
attempts to live the experience of knowing, by
substituting it with the readings of our teachers and
referents: Freud, Klein, Lacan … who reached
conclusive answers, or their exegetes attributed this
to them. We may remain acceptably comfortable
with this knowledge. Or we may keep searching. Let
us dare to think differently and go beyond the
limitations imposed by theory, sustaining the risks
of the uncertainty of practice, by accepting the
ethical commitment of theory, or science, but escap-
ing dependence upon it.
Are drive theory and intersubjectivity really
incompatible? Does what cannot happen simulta-
neously need to be really incompatible, either
because the precise appreciation of a certain phe-
nomenon prevents that of the other, as in Heisen-
berg’s uncertainty principle of 1927, or due to its
own existence? Human history is a permanent
example of evolution sustained on theories that
allowed an instrumental or cultural use of particular
views of the world (and human beings) for often
considerably long periods of time, and which were
eventually proved wrong. This has not impeded the
advance of knowledge or the radical evolution of
theories, without a complete loss of those now con-
sidered obsolete. Ptolomaeus and Copernicus are no
longer useful to understand our position in the
universe, and our world (quantum and relativistic)
keeps on evolving.

*Correspondence: Alejandro Ávila, PhD, Alberto Aguilera, 10 Esc. Izqda-1°, 28015 Madrid, Spain. Tel: +34 63 6984800. Fax +34 91 4457333. E-mail:
avilaespada@psicoterapiarelacional.es
†
This is a fully revised version of the paper previously read at the XIth IARPP Conference in Santiago de Chile, November 8, 2013, as a discussion of the plenary
“Drives and Fields: Are Drive Theory and Intersubjectivity Really Incompatible?”

© 2014 The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies

 2 A. Ávila
Freud did not look at subjectivity phenomena
from an intersubjectivist perspective. It was daring
enough to turn the world from reason to the uncon-
scious without losing the connection to biology (the
psychic as a derivative of biology). After over a
century of profound social and cultural transforma-
tions, we can no longer ignore the intrinsically social
essence of human beings, the connection between
our biological nature and our social construction of
subjectivity. Recent scientific developments stress
that human nature, from its biological evolution to
its cultural products, becomes differentiated by the
social sphere that makes it possible. The relational
perspective helps us to understand how all phenom-
ena that acquire meaning result from an intersubjec-
tive construction.
Downloaded by [Georgian Court University] at 22:19 06 March 2015
Thus, the question of incompatibility of theories
has its pitfalls: viewing them as alternative theories
ignores the fact that they aim at explaining phenom-
ena from different levels of analysis. All human
beings are at the intersection of their own intra/
intersubjective modulation on their particular biolo-
gical nature, which, however modeled by their socio-
relational contexts, carries idiosyncratic imprints
such as temperament, defenses, personality, and so
on. In such recovery of what is most idiosyncratic,
the drive metaphor will always facilitate a plausible
answer, particularly when the individual appears so
much affected by traumatic bonds and contexts that
their relational possibilities are very much restricted
and their bonding sphere seems blurred. Although
this quantitative resemblance is poor, the more rela-
tionally deprived we are, the more susceptible our
dynamics and experience become to being described
in purely metapsychological terms. As a result, if the
chosen level of understanding and analysis is the
individual, drive theory will sooner or later efficiently
come to our aid.
However, this will not provide an explanation of
human change. Human evolution, from early devel-
opment to adult psychic change, occurs at a different
phenomenical level: intersubjectivity, in a broad
sense; humans’ bonding sphere; their relational mat-
rix in transformation; the relational contexts humans
need to go through. Human beings change intersub-
jectively. We simply cannot change as individuals. We
change with others, in our bonds. This is indeed what
we all are most concerned with. However great our
epistemological yearning, we are essentially clinicians.
And it is precisely this sphere that intersubjectivist
theory allows to more deeply understand.
Our conception of the unconscious has changed.
It now includes embodied experience of emotional
regulation, and we conceive it as emergent proper-
ties of the field. Certainly, nobody with sufficient
longing for knowledge and the capacity to tolerate
the uncertainty of becoming detached (at least
partially) from the theories that we have been
familiar with for decades (such as, in traditional
psychoanalysis, libidinal theory, psychosexual devel-
opment, metapsychology, Oedipus, etc.) can reject
nowadays the contributions of neuroscience or early
developmental research, which have substantially
modified our perspectives. Let us not confuse the
descriptive and explanatory usefulness of certain
metaphors with the nature of the biopsychosocial
processes that constitute us as human beings.
What we denominate drive derives from somatic
states, genetically determined (by the specific
expression of genes), an execution of physiological
needs and synaptic traces of previous experiences that
condition or determine them. So far, we may remain
within the demands of Freudian drive theory. How-
ever, we must also include scenarios and qualifica-
tions to such determinants of the tensions associated
to somatic states: unconscious organizing patterns
co-constructed in early intersubjectivity; the internal
working models that configure interpersonal rela-
tions. It is not possible to explain the psyche just
through drive dynamics (in Freudian terms), or to
relegate it completely due to its explanatory limita-
tions. The intersubjective field appears to be more
decisive in the construction and development of
subjectivity, and the drive plane in the later subject-
ive differentiation of each individual. However, in
this differentiation, the relational object (Fairbairn,
1952) constitutive of early intersubjectivity and
meta-object in later human functioning plays a
crucial role. As Stolorow and Atwood (1992) or
Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow (1997) so clearly
summarized, “intersubjective” refers to the dialect-
ical process through which participants recognize
each other as centers of subjective experience, while
simultaneously permanently denying the other as a
separate subject. This constitutive process occurs
through recognition and destruction (Benjamin,
1995), in which the analyst participates through the
process of the emergence of their non-formulated
experience (Stern, D.B., 1997, 2010), although
embodied, inserted into the rhythms of dialog
(Knoblauch, 2000), and through a continuous
reflection on their own subjectivity, their theories,
and the impact of their own psychological organiza-
tion on their patient (Coderch, 2012).
Drive and intersubjectivity. Bond, field, and rela-
tional matrix. All these concepts have arisen at
different descriptive and explanatory levels, in dif-
ferent contexts and historical-social times, and we
may use them according to our demands of under-
standing, explanation, and practice.
Relational is a term that can be used to qualify
various nouns. It emphasizes the impact of human

relations on the genesis and dynamics of mental
activity, configured as bipersonal psychology, in
which the impact of the observer on the observed is
permanent and inescapable. Human beings are born
and live in relationships from their early interactions
(before, during and after birth) onward, and their
personal history is inseparable from social, cultural,
and family contexts, which determine their person-
ality (Sullivan, 1953). It includes a wide relational
field, sphere, or system in which psychological phe-
nomena crystallize and emerge; in which experience
is permanently and mutually shared and organized
in a reciprocal manner; and in which the experience
of the other cannot be known directly, nor whose is
truer, for both are, however contradictory they
may seem.
Downloaded by [Georgian Court University] at 22:19 06 March 2015
Bond denotes significant interpersonal and social
union. The main difference between being in a
relationship or in a bond lies in the fact that, in the
latter, interpersonal union interlocks the participants
in a longlasting manner that is loaded with meaning,
however different such a meaning might be for each
participant of the bond. The bond always carries
affects (positive or negative), meanings (intrasubjec-
tive, shared in the relationship, social, coherent, or
contradictory, as in double bonds), and history (of
the bond, its connections, and the social and sub-
jective consequences). The concept of bond was
formulated by Enrique Pichon Rivière (1985), as
the psychogenetic organizer of subjectivity, substi-
tuting the concept of Freudian instinct (drive). For
Pichon Rivière, the subject is active, and the bond
constitutes the particular way in which the subject
connects or relates to others through a particular
structure, creating and transforming their socio-
cultural context in each bond and moment. The
bond includes the subject and the object, their
interaction, and their ways of communication and
learning, making up a dialectical spiral process in
permanent self-construction.
The term bonding sphere can be used to refer to a
complex domain, the bond system around the subject
and their groups of belonging and reference. It may
be described at various levels: the intrasubjective or
intrapsychic level, as an area of unconscious repres-
entation; in terms of its intersubjective nature, as an
observable phenomenon in mutual determinations,
which configures all experience, from implicit rela-
tional knowledge, to relational patterns, relational
matrix, or stable bond structures; in terms of its
biological origins, as a species programming and
inborn motivational system; and in its multiple
meanings and social functions, as transcending the
limits of the subjects who integrate it.
Intersubjectivity is a term that refers to the level of
phenomena on which human subjectivity is founded,
The intersubjective 3
as well as to the expression and unfolding of subject-
ivity in the sphere of relations. The first meaning
involves the essential intersubjectivity that can be
observed since the first stages of development, when
implicit relational knowledge between infant and
caregiver begins to be configured. It involves mutual
regulation and constitutes the basis for the unfolding
of the functions and processes that configure com-
munication, as well as the use of the functions
involved in significant connections to other human
beings, particularly the primary caregiver (Stern,
D.N., 1985; Tomasello, 1999; Trevarthen, 1993;
Tronick et al., 1978).
Relational matrix, an expression coined by S.A.
Mitchell (1988), refers to those persons inserted,
since their origins, into a relational matrix, past and
present, which directs and modulates the develop-
ment of their personalities. In contrast with the
Freudian concept of the psychic apparatus (as a
structure containing representations of drives,
objects, conflicts, defenses, and other instances),
Mitchell begins to consider subjectivity as the result
of the relational matrix or bond phenomena, constituted
by the history of past experiences of significant
relationships through the lived contexts. The psychic
experience and mental processes that make up
subjectivity are both the product of the reciprocal
influence between the subject and the others, in bi-
directional intersubjective contexts (formed through
the intercommunication of worlds of experience
reciprocally interacting). Articulated in unconscious
organizing principles, intersubjective fantasmatic plots,
they are not the mere result of unconscious activity
derived from drive–defense conflicts. Instead, they
constitute unconscious patterns (specific neuronal
networks) that tend to repetition in relationship
scenarios that contribute to trigger their activation.
The psychic plot develops on the basis of implicit
relational knowledge that derives from the early
relational matrix, which includes progressively con-
flictive nodes as a result of situations of deficit that
demand compensatory overadaptations. These con-
flicts are unconsciously recreated throughout the
history of the individual, in their past and present
relationships, and the therapeutic relationship pro-
vides an opportunity to access and transform such
experiences.
Field (intersubjective) is a concept derived from
Lewinian field theory and used by W. and M.
Baranger (1969) and recently updated (Baranger,
2012) to define the analytic situation as a dynamic
field, with intra- and intersubjective aspects. The
intersubjective field is configured by the bond phe-
nomena that occur and reactualize in the analytic
situation as a field shared by both analyst and
patient. Pichon Rivière and the Barangers were the
 4 A. Ávila
first to place object relations and intersubjectivity at
the heart of the bond or the bipersonal field (Ávila,
2013c), projecting the internal theatre of the mind
onto the bipersonal field of analyst and analysand, a
field made up by the intersubjectivity of the analyst,
who offers the analysand the possibility to use the
analyst as an object that is able to contain, metabol-
ize, and regulate emotional experience. The bond
serves as the bridge between psychic representations
and the interpersonal, and constitutes the essence
of intersubjectivity. The subject unfolds in the
conscience of the dialectical relationship between
recognition and denial, a spiral process in which
subjectivity is configured in the encounter with the
object, where tensions become metabolized by the
containment offered by the bond, avoiding destruc-
Downloaded by [Georgian Court University] at 22:19 06 March 2015
tivity, providing the possibility of repair, in a field
that is open to new emotional experiences that
become transformed from the unmanageable to
symbolized representations. Sullivan (1953), Winni-
cott (1969), Bion (1957), Benjamin (1995), Ogden
(1994), and Mitchell (1988) converge with Pichon
Rivière and the Barangers in understanding that
the key processes in the configuration of subjectivity
are the bond and fields system that articulate
the relational sphere where subjectivity unfolds, and
which is lived by all participants as embodied
emotional experience; it is also where social and
cultural experience is registered in the body, as
Knoblauch (2014) puts it, the body conceived as a
“subjectively experiencing site where internal and
interactional registrations of Self and Otherness
dance in bond,” a bond that involves both repres-
entation and body experience, thus organizing non-
conscious experience of the Self and the Other in the
sphere of subjectivities, while simultaneously sup-
porting their permanent transformation. Intersubjec-
tivity is an emergent property of the interpersonal
field, and psychoanalysis represents an opportunity
of discovery, through curiosity and acceptance of
uncertainty, playing with reality, where the unpre-
dictable vicissitudes of relationality configure a
scenario of change.
Many current analysts have been deeply influ-
enced by this frame of thinking, and relationality has
penetrated their experience and transformed them,
with echoes in their analytical practice of Ferenczi’s
technical freedom (Ferenczi, 1928, 1988), under-
standing object relations like Fairbairn did (1952),
assuming the use of the object and sustaining the
bond like Winnicott (1969) or Kohut (1984), pro-
viding a generative container like Bion (1957), and
questioning themselves just like Mitchell did. What
patients and analysts are most concerned about is
the availability to take part in new experiences that
may prove transforming, emerging from the biper-
sonal field to configure new bonding experiences
and modify the nature of the relational matrix. The
analyst’s understanding of the dynamics sustains
them, but they participate relationally in the process
of change, which proves critical.
This is the field for clinical psychoanalysis. The
relationship constitutes both the context and the
entry gate to transformation, an issue I have focused
on in previous works (Ávila, 2005, 2009, 2013a,
2013b). This theoretical framework, with its deep
technical implications, is rooted in the strong devel-
opments received from infant research, neu-
roscience, and the deep social and cultural changes
that face twenty-first-century societies. All these
together promote a new scene for today’s psycho-
analysis in convergence with these relational
proposals.
English translation by Luis Sandoval and the author.
References
Ávila, A. (2005). Al cambio psíquico se accede por la relación
[Relationship: The path to psychic change]. Intersub-
jetivo. Revista de Psicoterapia Psicoanalítica y Salud, 7
(2), 195–220.
Ávila, A. (2009). Artesano de necesidades y tiempos, el
psicoterapeuta realiza sus obras con restos de naufragios
[The psychotherapist, artisan of needs and time,
creates his works by salvaging remains from wrecks].
Clínica e Investigación Relacional, 3(3), 582–592.
Ávila Espada, A. (2013a). Hacernos personas recorriendo el
camino del cambio [Becoming persons in the journey of
change]. Clínica e Investigación Relacional, 7(1), 79–86.
Ávila Espada, A. (2013b). La relación, contexto determinante
de la transformación. Reflexiones en torno al papel de la
interpretación, el insight y la experiencia emocional en
el cambio psíquico [Relationship, a decisive context for
transformation]. Temas de Psicoanálisis, (6). Retrieved
from http://www.temasdepsicoanalisis.org/la-relacion-
contexto-determinante-de-la-transformacion1/
Ávila Espada, A. (ed.). (2013c). La tradición interpersonal.
Perspectiva social y cultural del Psicoanálisis. [Interper-
sonal tradition. Social and cultural perspective in
psychoanalysis]. Madrid: Ágora Relacional.
Baranger, M. (2012). The intrapsychic and the intersub-
jective in contemporary psychoanalysis, International
Forum of Psychoanalysis, 21(3–4), 130–135.
Baranger, M., & Baranger, W. (1969). Problemas del campo
psicoanalítico [Problems of psychoanalytic field]. Bue-
nos Aires: Kargieman.
Benjamin, J. (1995). Recognition and destruction: An
outline of intersubjectivity. In Like subjects, love objects:
Essays on recognition and sexual difference (pp. 27–48).
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Bion, W.R. (1957). Second thoughts: Selected papers on
psychoanalysis. Nueva York: Basic Books.
Coderch, J. (2012). Realidad, Interacción y cambio psíquico.
La práctica de la psicoterapia relacional-II [Reality,
interaction and psychic change. The practice of
relational psychotherapy-II]. Madrid: Ágora Relacional.
Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952). Psychoanalytical studies of the
personality. London: Tavistock.

Ferenczi, S. (1928). The elasticity of psychoanalytic
technique. In Final contributions to the problems and
methods of psychoanalysis (pp. 87–101). London:
Maresfield.
Ferenczi, S. (1988). The clinical diary of Sándor Ferenczi (J.
Dupont, ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Knoblauch, S.H. (2000). The musical edge of therapeutic
dialogue. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Knoblauch, S.H. (2014). El inconsciente teórico: Pulsión,
Campo y más allá [The theoretical unconscious:
Drive, field and beyond]. Clínica e Investigación
Relacional, 8(1), 11–20.
Kohut, H. (1984). How does analysis cure? Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, S.A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis:
An integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Ogden, T.H. (1994). The analytic third: Working with
Downloaded by [Georgian Court University] at 22:19 06 March 2015
intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 75, 3–19.
Orange, D., Atwood, G., & Stolorow, R.D. (1997).
Working intersubjectively. Contextualism in the psycho-
analytic practice. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Pichon Rivière, E. (1985). Teoría del Vínculo [Bond
theory]. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión.
Stern, D.B. (1997). Unformulated experience: From dissoci-
ation to imagination in psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press.
Stern, D.B. (2010). Partners in thought. Working with
unformulated experience, dissociation and enactment.
New York: Routledge.
Stern, D.N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant.
New York: Basic Books.
The intersubjective 5
Stolorow R.D., & Atwood, G. (1992). Contexts of being:
The intersubjective foundations of psychological life. Hills-
dale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Sullivan, H.S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry
(Swick, H., and Ladd, M., Comp.). New York:
Norton.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human
cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Trevarthen, C. (1993). The self born in intersubjectivity:
an infant communicating. In U. Neissser (ed.), The
perceived self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of self-
knowledge (pp. 121–173). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Tronick, E., Als, H., Adamson, L., Wise, S. & Brazelton,
T.B. (1978). The infant’s response to entrapment
between contradictory messages in face-to-face inter-
action. Journal of Communication, 27, 74–80.
Winnicott, D.W. (1969). The use of an object. Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50, 711–716.
Author
Alejandro Ávila, PhD, is a full professor of psy-
choanalytic psychotherapy at Complutense Univer-
sity, Madrid. He is a training member and honorary
president of the Institute of Relational Psychother-
apy, Madrid, as well as a board member of the
International Association for Relational Psychoana-
lysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) and chair of
IARPP’s Spanish chapter.