The relationality of finitude1

A common misconception among critics of relational perspectives in psychoanalysis is the notion that an emphasis on the relational or intersubjective contexts of emotional experience defocuses, or even nulli!es, experiences of individualized selfhood. As my collaborators and I (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2006) have emphasized, such criticisms tend to collapse the distinction between phenomenological description and theoretical explanation. As a phenomenon investigated by the psychoanalytic method, individualized selfhood is grasped always and only as a dimension of personal experiencing. Explanations of this dimension (or of disturbances in it) in terms of its taking form within intersubjective systems do not in any way imply a neglect or annulment of it. Contextualizing is not nullifying. Husserl (1900/1913), widely regarded as the founder of philosophical phenomenology, claimed that careful phenomenological description of structures of experience is a precondition for adequate theoretical explanations of them. Individualized selfhood is a dimension or structure of experience. For more than 25 years, my collaborators and I2 have sought both to illuminate this structure (phenomenological description) and to conceptualize the intersubjective systems that facilitate or obstruct its consolidation (theoretical explanation). The present chapter is a continuation and deepening of this twofold effort. Drawing on concepts from philosophical phenomenology—the work of Zahavi (2005), in particular—I will !rst argue that at the core of the experience of individualized selfhood is the sense of “mineness” of one’s experiential life. Next I will contend that attuned relationality—the other’s attunement to and understanding of one’s distinctive affectivity—is a central constituent of the relational contexts that facilitate and sustain