Peter: The first question I wanted to ask is for readers who might not be familiar with your previous work. Would you describe what led you to write this book, Worlds of Experience, with George Atwood and Donna Orange, and how it builds on your previous work.
Bob: Well, we've been developing a perspective in psychoanalysis that we now call intersubjective systems theory, for nearly three decades. The first article in which we use the phrase "intersubjective perspective," was written in 1976. It was published in 1978. First, we've been developing the intersubjective perspective as a clinical theory, looking at all the basic clinical phenomena that occur in psychoanalytic treatment as occurring at the interface of the interacting experiential worlds of patient and analyst. Second, we have been rethinking some of the basic theoretical pillars of psychoanalytic theory. The present book was primarily directed at looking at the philosophical foundations of our perspective. We contrast those with the philosophical foundations of traditional psychoanalytic theory and practice and then try to demonstrate that the differing philosophical foundations make a huge clinical difference. That was the basic idea. To elaborate a little more, we came to the conclusion that traditional psychoanalytic theory and practice along with some contemporary approaches like self psychology and relational psychoanalysis have very powerful roots in Descartes's philosophy of the isolated mind. One way of looking at the philosophical foundations of our intersubjective perspective is that it's an attempt to ground intersubjective systems theory and practice in a post-Cartesian, or maybe more accurately a non-Cartesian, philosophy of mind, which we refer to with various terms, such as intersubjective systems theory or more broadly as a kind of psychoanalytic contextualism. The basic idea is that personal experience always takes form in a context of interrelatedness.
Peter: It seems like a way of thinking that lends itself to working collaboratively with colleagues in writing a book.
Bob: Absolutely. As a matter of fact it was George's idea, long ago, that the collaboration among all of us is sort of a metalog for the basic theoretical principle, which is that all psychological products take form within formative intersubjective contexts. The process of developing intersubjective systems theory is a sort of metaphor or a metalog for the basic concept of the theory.
Peter: Would you say something about the process of the three of you working together developing these ideas and then something about how you write together.
Bob: As is usually our way, we didn't sit down and try to write a book. We usually decide on various individual articles that we want to write, with an eye toward later pulling them together into a book. That's what we definitely did with virtually all of the chapters in this book. They were originally written as articles. There are a couple exceptions. These include part of the introductory chapter and the chapter on perspectival realism, but other than that they were written as individual articles but definitely with an eye toward a larger book. We wrote the individual articles with the guiding idea that I mentioned before about looking to the philosophical foundations of both traditional psychoanalysis and our psychoanalytic perspective and their profound clinical implications. So that's how we went about it. The way we do it is we would take an individual article, which would then become a chapter, and, it may be that all three of us would be interested in that particular topic or two of us or one of us or whatever the case may be, and if more than one of us were interested in that particular topic, then we would divide up that topic between the coauthors, and then we would edit each others' work. All of us would edit what each of us individually would write.
Peter: Living in different parts of the country, do you actually get together, do you dialogue together by phone, or do you to do it by sending the articles back and forth?
Bob: Well, both: we would send them back and forth and we would usually get together two or three times a year or we'd speak over the phone. I'm actually beginning to overcome my computer fear and use email.
Peter: I'm really curious about how the ideas develop and whether they develop out of dialogue; are the three of you sitting in a coffee shop talking about this, or on the phone?
Bob: They absolutely developed in a dialogue. And it's been going on between George Atwood and me since we first met each other in 1972. Very quickly after we met each other at Rutgers University, we discovered that a kind of magic would take place every time he and I would sit down and start to talk about ideas. Ideas would just kind of tumble into our discussion in ways that just don't happen in other contexts and, you know each of us might be having a dry spell for some long period of time, and so as we begin talking about something, it can be sitting down, it can be over the phone. All of a sudden ideas start appearing like magic, and Donna joined the club around 1995, and something kind of similar happens with Donna also. It doesn't have as long a history. There's something about the way that George's and my experiential worlds play off of one another and later Donna's with both of us. It's just kind of magical.
Peter: In your new book, Worlds of Experience, you discuss the case that you originally wrote up for graduation from the Institute and then revisited it from the new perspective. In reading it, it seems like a very beautiful illustration of the different ways that clinical material can be understood. What made you go back to that case?
Bob: Well because it just seemed like a wonderful example of an alternative to the Freudian theory of repression. It was for the chapter called "World Horizons", and it just seemed to be a case that beautifully demonstrates the ways in which what can be allowed into consciousness and what must be prevented from coming into being consciousness are determined within particular intersubjective contexts, both developmentally and in the therapeutic situation. I believed that I had known that intuitively when I was doing the analytic work, with Frank (Lachmann) as my supervisor of the case, but that intuitive understanding was not yet really articulated by me and didn't find a place in the original case report for my graduation paper from Postgraduate Center, nor did it find its way into a published article that Frank and I did together later. But it still kind of remained with me in kind of an unarticulated way until I was able to articulate it when I took another look at it from the standpoint of intersubjective systems theory.
Peter: Would you say more about that?
Bob: Well the concept of horizons of experience is a concept that comes from continental philosophy. It's a concept that I believe may have originated with Husserl but was also used by Heidegger and very powerfully by Gadamer. The idea of a horizon beyond which one cannot experience or perceive seemed to me to be a beautiful metaphor for the problem of unconsciousness in psychoanalysis. The beauty of it, the way we conceptualize the horizons of experience or horizons of awareness, is that they are always an emergent feature of ongoing intersubjective systems rather than being fixed properties of isolated minds. So in a certain way the concept of intersubjectively embedded worlds of experience or intersubjectively formed horizons of emotional experience is a beautiful example of a post-Cartesian rather than a Cartesian view of the problem of unconsciousness.
Peter: You seem not to be using the phrase "organization of experience" much in the book. You talk more in terms of "worlds of experience". Is there a shift that's taken place for you?
Bob: Well, there may be a subtle shift. The concept of organizations of experiences is still extremely important to us. We still use the concept of organizing principles but the concept of worlds is a more powerful metaphor for capturing the relentlessly contextual quality of personal experiencing. One of the ways it's put in the book, and actually it was Donna who came up with this marvelously poetic statement, is that we inhabit our experiential worlds even as they inhabit us. To me that's a beautiful statement of a post-Cartesian or a non-Cartesian way of understanding human experience. We inhabit our experiential worlds even as they inhabit us. There's no trace of an isolated mind in that statement, nor is there any trace of the Cartesian split between subject and object or between inside and outside. All of those dichotomies are deconstructed within a post-Cartesian framework. So, the three of us came to the idea that the concept of worlds of experience is a metaphor that captures the post-Cartesian or a non-Cartesian outlook more powerfully than the idea of organizations of experience, although that continues to be an important idea for us also.
Peter: In prior writings you refer to intersubjective systems theory as a "metatheory". What do you mean by that?
Bob: Well, it's a little confusing because actually I think there are probably two meanings of the phrase "intersubjective systems theory." As a metatheory, what we mean is that it's a framework or really a sensibility, as Donna Orange also was the first to say, a sensibility that constantly emphasizes context. And by emphasizing context it always emphasizes perspective also, context and perspective. And as a sensibility with that emphasis, it can be employed by people who still have an allegiance to other clinical theories; Freudian, object-relational, and so on. So, in a sense it can be a metaframework that can guide people using various other theoretical perspectives. It can also be a theory of theory because it contains within it, going back to Faces in a Cloud, an idea about the contextual aspect of theory formation itself. So that's one meaning of the term "intersubjective systems theory." But then another meaning of it is that there has also been a rather specific clinical framework that has developed among us, among all of the collaborators. In the context of elaborating the more general metatheory, this more specific clinical theory includes things like unconscious organizing principles, a view of transference as unconscious organizing activity, the idea of two basics aspects or dimensions of transference - the repetitive/conflictual/resistive dimension and the developmental dimension - and particular theoretical ideas about the formation of different states of mind such as so-called borderline states and psychotic states. So there's a rather elaborate and specific clinical theory that also goes by the name intersubjective systems theory. That's not what we're talking about when we say that we are offering a metatheory. Then we're talking about that first more general sensibility that I was describing before.
Peter: Is there anything else you want to talk about that Worlds of Experience covers?
Bob: Well, if I had to pick one theme that the book is trying to drive home, it's that one's underlying philosophical assumptions can make a huge difference in one's clinical work. That is probably the central thing that we are trying to drive home in that book.
Peter: And you include some good examples of that.
Bob: Especially in the chapter on the treatment of psychotic states, which was primarily written by George. It's sort of George's "magnum opus." It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from him. Another thing I might say about the book in terms of the collaboration is that I think the book probably combines the best of the three of us.
Peter: Well, say more about that.
Bob: Well, I think I have a gift for theoretical clarity, and for rethinking various aspects of psychoanalytic theory from an intersubjective perspective. So my contribution in a certain way is a culmination of three decades of trying to do that. I think George has a particular gift for clinical phenomenology. Not that he doesn't have a gift for theorizing also, but I'm just kind of delineating what I think might be special in terms of the three of us. George has a particular gift for clinical phenomenology, particularly in being able to capture in a highly evocative way the phenomenology of extreme states of mind such as experiences of personal annihilation. And Donna brings a gift for understanding and being able to articulate philosophical foundations and philosophical assumptions because of her background in philosophy. So, I think when you put the three of us together, you get a pretty powerful combination.
Peter: Bob, I've really enjoyed this. (Laughter) I really have struggled with these ideas and I'm glad that you've been able to clarify them.
Bob: Well thanks, Peter. I think it's kind of cool that this takes us back really to the beginnings of both of our psychoanalytic education when we were fellow candidates. (Laughter)
Donna Orange and George Atwood were invited to add some thoughts to the interview. Below are Donna's comments.
Donna: I think we do have small differences in perspective, as one would expect from three troublemakers, but they are so minor as to seem to disappear in the context of our massive commonalities of thought and sensibility. George and I, for example, who had weekly breakfast meetings for more than ten years, argue from time to time about the possibility of, and importance of, dialogue with those with whom we disagree. Bob and I differ in our feeling about the term 'affect,' which he loves and which I almost never use. For him, it denotes "subjective emotional experiencing." For me, it sounds like reductionist jargon reminiscent of psychiatric case conferences, where reified (as it seemed to me) "affects" were ascribed to patients by god's-eye-view clinicians, without any reference to relational contexts, or to the participation or bias of the clinician. I speak, instead, of emotionality (emotional memory, emotional availability, emotional communication) and consider emotion an emergent property of relational experience (according to processes well-described by Beebe and Lachmann). The Italian language captures this well using "to emotion" (emozionare, emozionarsi) as a verb, both active and reflexive. But surely you can see that these differences have more to do with ways of expressing ourselves than with anything substantial. I mention these instances to convey some of the quality of our dialogues and trialogues.
