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ABSTRACT
This article examines D. W. Winnicott's contributions to intersubjectivity theory and the elaboration of these contributions by several contemporary scholars. Following an exploration of the precursors to today's intersubjectivity theory found in Winnicott's developmental formulations, the author reviews several instances of the analyst's clinical work. This review suggests that Winnicott had difficulty with the therapeutic management of aggression-the affect he believed to be essential to the development of a capacity for intersubjective relatedness. The article concludes with the implications of this finding for clinical social work practice.
INTRODUCTION
Proponents of late twentieth-century postmodernism contend that prevailing behavioral and clinical theories are stories we tell about how people get to be the way they are and how to help them change. New or emerging stories typically introduce new vocabularies and new metaphors to the clinical lexicon. The story of classical psychodynamic theory, for example, is a tale about the isolated individual contending with endogenous drives, conflicts, defenses, and intrapsychic structures that can be modified via transference to a detached clinician whose observational objectivity permits her to deliver mutative interpretations. In this story, countertransference is something to be self-analyzed away, lest it compromise the clinician's objectivity-the presumed linchpin of her expertise.
The emerging story of intersubjectivity, in contrast, is one about the relationship between people as both the catalyst for development and the vehicle for therapeutic change. Told in words and metaphors such as holding, mirroring, attunement, empathy, and mutuality, this story moves the locus of development from drive to affect and shifts the medium of change from interpretation by an expert other or "object" to a new, presumably reparative relational experience with a real, fallible person-a subject with an inner life of his own. In the intersubjectivity story, transference and countertransference are co-constructed in the relational "space" between client and clinician, forming "an intersubjective system of reciprocal mutual influence" (Stolorow, 1994, p. 10). Rather than resistance to be dispelled, the transference-countertransference "system" is instead seen as an essential element of the therapeutic process that delivers "news from within" (Bollas, 1987) about the deepest recesses of both the client's and clinician's subjectivities.
The term intersubjectivity, first appearing in the social theory of Jurgen Habermas (1970), was imported to the clinical literature twenty years...