Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity:

I confess to a degree of ambivalence in writing a paper on the relevance of the concept of intersubjectivity for psychoanalytic theory and practice. The concept has been around for the better part of a century, and while its history is unclear Husserl was apparently the first philosopher to employ the term as a fundamental facet of his philosophy, making it a cardinal principle of his philosophical method, phenomenology. Its currency pervades the phenomenological literature, including the work of and many others. In the context of phenomenology, intersubjectivity is inseparable from the concept of experience and is applicable when endeavoring to determine self's relation to others, and the relation between self's experience of others as subjects of experiences that are not directly given to self. Intersubjectivity was subsequently adopted by philosophers who are not wedded to the phenomenological critique of experience, including Apel and Habermas who reject the phenomenological emphasis on consciousness and its subjective bias in favor of a conception of intersubjectivity that is situated in language as an instrument of communication. Consequently there are two philosophical traditions from which intersubjectivity may be discerned: 1) through the subject's conscious experience of others, and 2) through the unconscious dimension of language, which serves as a vehicle for discourse. Both of these avenues are distinctive and suggest different applications to both theory and practice of psychoanalysis, yet few analysts who identify themselves as working from an intersubjective perspective reference the history of this concept, and for those who do the sources they typically cite are not explicitly concerned with intersubjectivity theory. For example, some of the contemporary analysts who identify themselves with intersubjectivity (Benjamin; Auerbach and Blatt) appeal to the legacy of G. W. F. Hegel as the source of their understanding of intersubjectivity theory. Yet Hegel never employed the term in his philosophy and, as one of history's most famous idealists, was unsympathetic with most of its features. If, for the sake