intersubjective understanding
Intersubjectivity occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, drawing together phenomenological philosophy, embodied cognitive science, psychoanalytic clinical theory, and developmental research. The term names the structural condition by which individual subjectivity is always already constituted in relation to others — not as a secondary achievement but as a primordial ground. Husserl’s foundational problematic, taken up critically by Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Thompson, asks how one consciousness can genuinely apprehend another. Within psychoanalytic depth psychology, Ogden transforms the question into a clinical one: how analyst and analysand jointly generate an unconscious ‘analytic third’ that is irreducible to either individual subjectivity. Gallagher, working from embodied phenomenology and developmental data, contests theory-of-mind accounts in favor of a primary intersubjectivity grounded in bodily coupling and mirror-neuron systems, with autism serving as the diagnostic limit case. McGilchrist situates Husserlian intersubjectivity within his hemispheric framework, treating it as evidence that the right hemisphere’s relational orientation is philosophically indispensable. Ricoeur approaches the problem hermeneutically, arguing that selfhood is intelligible only through the network of intersubjectivity and the analogical transfer between flesh and body. Samuels and Smythe bring the Jungian tradition into dialogue with Buber and Taylor, diagnosing Jung’s model as structurally incapable of accounting for genuine dyadic encounter. The central tension across these voices concerns whether intersubjectivity is constitutive of the self from the outset or an accomplishment requiring theoretical mediation.
Individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, originally engaged with and altered by others in specific geological and cultural environments.
Thompson advances the enactive view that subjectivity is constitutively intersubjective, arguing that classical cognitive science’s individualist assumption rendered it structurally incapable of analyzing intersubjective and cultural contributions to mind.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the analytic enterprise as centrally involving an effort on the part of the analyst to track the dialectical movement of individual subjectivity… and intersubjectivity (the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair—the analytic third).
Ogden defines the analytic enterprise through the dialectical interplay of individual subjectivity and jointly created intersubjectivity, proposing the ‘analytic third’ as the clinical concept that makes this dynamic theorizable.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994thesis
Intersubjectivity, social cognition, or the problem of other minds — these are terms in different disciplines for the same problem: how does one understand other people — how does one grasp their intentions?
Gallagher frames intersubjectivity as the convergent problem across cognitive science, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind, and proposes an interactive, embodied account as an alternative to theory-of-mind and simulation-theory approaches.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis
projective identification involves a type of partial collapse of the dialectical movement of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, resulting in the subjugation (of the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand) by the analytic third.
Ogden reconceives projective identification as a pathological implosion of the subjectivity–intersubjectivity dialectic, in which a co-created third subjugates both participants’ individual psychic lives.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994thesis
my flesh appears as a body among bodies only to the extent that I am myself an other among all the others, in the apprehension of a common nature, woven, as Husserl says, out of the network of intersubjectivity.
Ricoeur, critically engaging Husserl, argues that selfhood and embodiment are intelligible only within a network of intersubjectivity that cannot be derived from a purely egological starting point.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Human beings have a need as deep as hunger and thirst to establish intersubjective constructions (including projective identifications), in order to find an exit from unending, futile wanderings in their own internal object world.
Ogden posits intersubjective construction as a fundamental human need, not merely a technical analytic occurrence, grounding the clinical value of projective identification in an ontological claim about self and other.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994thesis
Although the analyst’s reveries are personal psychological events, I view them as unconscious intersubjective constructions generated by analyst and analysand.
Ogden extends his intersubjective framework to the analyst’s reverie, treating apparently private mental events as co-authored, unconsciously intersubjective phenomena arising from the analytic pair.
, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting
HUSSERL AND THE IDEA OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY Edmund Husserl was born in Moravia in 1859… his main works were published between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War.
McGilchrist introduces Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity as a key exhibit for his argument that right-hemisphere relational thinking has been philosophically indispensable, even when pursued through left-hemisphere analytic tools.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
the unconscious dialectical movement of individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the analytic setting… my experience as analyst… are contextualized by the intersubjective experience created by analyst and analysand.
Ogden illustrates through clinical material how even the analyst’s most mundane bodily and mental states are shaped by the intersubjective field jointly created with the analysand.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994supporting
Grandin uses a variety of strategies to make up for a loss of a natural intersubjectivity… ‘Grandin’s compensatory way of understanding others perfectly resembles how normal intersubjective understanding is portrayed by the proponents of the theory-theory’.
Gallagher uses Temple Grandin’s case to demonstrate that autistic subjects must laboriously construct what neurotypical subjects access as primary intersubjectivity, thereby confirming the pre-theoretical, embodied character of ordinary intersubjective understanding.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
The perception of other people and the intersubjective world are problematical only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
Merleau-Ponty argues that the intersubjective world is the primary given for the child, and that the philosophically problematic character of other minds is a secondary, adult abstraction from this original lived communion.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
There exists in the newborn infant a natural intermodal coupling between self and other, one that does not involve a confused experience.
Gallagher grounds primary intersubjectivity in the newborn’s innate intermodal coupling between self and other, providing an embodied, developmental foundation that precedes and underlies any theoretical or inferential grasp of other minds.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other bodily entities that establishes, for me…
Abram, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, extends intersubjectivity beyond the human dyad to encompass all sentient organisms, grounding shared perceptual reality in a more-than-human intersubjective field.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
Jung always refers to ‘the external world’ as something lying beyond the individual psyche rather than as a world of other persons… his model did not allow of this possibility.
Samuels, via Zinkin, identifies a structural lacuna in Jung’s model: neither ego nor self is theorized as capable of genuine intersubjective encounter, requiring post-Jungian correctives drawn from Buber’s philosophy of dialogue.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
it is impossible to construct this dialectic in a unilateral manner, whether one attempts, with Husserl, to derive the alter ego from the ego, or whether, with Lévinas, one reserves for the Other the exclusive initiative.
Ricoeur argues that both Husserl’s egological derivation of the other and Lévinas’s asymmetric ethics of the Other are insufficient, demanding a two-pronged conception of otherness that does justice to both self-esteem and the other’s convocation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
long before we can exercise the capacity for intentional positioning in dialogical space… our dialogical selves are already formed by the pre-intentional and inarticulate matrix of our relations with others.
Smythe, integrating Taylor’s hermeneutics into a post-Jungian framework, argues that dialogue and intersubjective background understanding are constitutive of self prior to any intentional or agentic positioning.
, The Dialogical Jung: Otherness within the Self, 2013supporting
our primary encounters with others are in these pragmatic contexts. This is directly related to secondary intersubjectivity, discussed below.
Gallagher, following Heidegger and Gurwitsch, grounds secondary intersubjectivity in pragmatic, tool-mediated encounters with others, distinguishing it from primary embodied coupling and from theory-laden inference.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
experiences in and of the analytic third often generate a quality of intimacy between patient and analyst that has ‘all the sense of real’.
Ogden observes that the intersubjective analytic third can generate enriching and generative forms of relatedness — including humor, camaraderie, and compassion — that may constitute the patient’s first experience of healthy object relating.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994supporting
solipsistic subjectivity on the one hand… and alienated objectivity on the other… tend to collapse into one another, and are merely facets of the same phenomenon: both imply isolation rather than connection.
McGilchrist argues that both solipsism and impersonal objectivism represent failures of intersubjective connection, implying that genuine selfhood requires a ‘view from somewhere’ grounded in relational, right-hemisphere engagement.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
intentionalities that are directed to the other as foreign, that is, as other than me, go beyond the sphere of ownness in which they are nevertheless rooted. Husserl gave the name ‘appresentation’ to this givenness.
Ricoeur explicates Husserl’s concept of appresentation as the paradoxical mode of givenness through which the other is accessible precisely as irreducibly foreign, establishing the aporia at the heart of any egological account of intersubjectivity.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside
B. Cohen, ‘Intersubjectivity and Narcissism in Group Psychotherapy: How Feedback Works,’ International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 50.
A bibliographic citation in Yalom marks the application of intersubjectivity to group-psychotherapy dynamics, particularly the role of feedback in mediating narcissistic and intersubjective processes within the group.
, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008aside