From Isolated Minds to Experiential Worlds:

An Intersubjective Space Odyssey

R O B E R T D. STOLOROW, Ph.D.*

This paper recasts psychoanalysis as a post-Cartesian, contextual psychology,

which grasps the constitutive role of relatedness in the making of all
experience.

In my view, the singularly most important development in psychoanalysis

(and, by extension, psychotherapy) at the turn of the millennium is its
ongoing liberation from the philosophical shackles that Freud inherited
from Descartes. The fundamental assumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis
were saturated with the Cartesian doctrine of the isolated mind. This
doctrine bifurcates the subjective world into outer and inner regions, reifies
the resulting separation between the two, and pictures the mind as an
objective entity that takes its place among other objects, a "thinking thing"
that has an inside with contents and looks out on an external world from
which it is radically estranged. Cartesian philosophy, with its "myth of the
isolated mind" (1), has until recently maintained a stranglehold on psycho-
analytic thought.
During the past two decades, a number of viewpoints have appeared
that seek, in varying degrees, to emancipate psychoanalytic theory from the
grip of Cartesian, isolated-mind thinking. Among such evolving efforts to
create a post-Cartesian psychoanalytic theory are Kohutian self psychology
(2), American relational theory (3, 4), and the intersubjective systems
theory developed by my collaborators and me (1,5). From our intersubjec-
tive perspective, clinical phenomena, such as psychopathological states,
transferences, resistances, and negative therapeutic reactions are grasped,
not as products of intrapsychic mechanisms originating within the interior
of the patient s isolated mind, but as taking form at the interface of the
interacting experiential worlds of patient and therapist. Even the very

^Faculty Member and Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis,
Los Angeles; Faculty Member, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York City;
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, U C L A School of Medicine. Mailing address: 11726 San Vicente Blvd.,
Suite 410, Los Angeles, CA 90049.

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boundary between conscious and unconscious—the so-called repression

barrier—is understood, both developmentally and in the therapeutic situa-
tion, not as a fixed intrapsychic structure, but as a fluidly shifting property
of an ongoing intersubjective system.
In place of the Freudian unconscious—a sealed-off, underground
chamber of the Cartesian isolated mind—we envision a multiply contextu-
alized experiential world, an organized totality of lived personal experi-
ence, more or less conscious and more or less contoured according to those
organizing principles formed in a lifetime of emotional and relational
experience. Instead of a Cartesian container, we picture an experiential
system of expectations, interpretive patterns, and meanings, especially
those formed in the contexts of psychological trauma. Within such a system
or world, one can feel and know certain things, often repetitively and with
unshakable certainty. Whatever one is not able to feel or know falls outside
the horizons of a person's experiential world, requiring no container. One is
always organizing one's emotional and relational experiences so as to
exclude whatever feels unacceptable, intolerable, or too dangerous in a
particular intersubjective context.
In this view, psychoanalytic therapy is no longer an archaeological
excavation of ever deeper layers of an isolated unconscious mind. Instead,
it is a dialogic exploration of a patient's experiential world, conducted with
an awareness of the unavertable contribution of the therapist's experiential
world to the ongoing exploration. Such inquiry seeks comprehension of the
principles that prereflectively organize the patient's world and that keep the
patient's experiencing confined to its limiting horizons. By illuminating
such principles in a dialogic context, psychoanalytic therapy aims to
expand the patient's experiential horizons, thereby opening up the possibil-
ity of an enriched, more complex, and more flexible emotional life.
In essence, we are recasting psychoanalysis as a contextual psychology,
which recognizes the constitutive role of relatedness in the making of all
experience. Experiential worlds and intersubjective fields are seen to
mutually constitute one another. Unlike Cartesian isolated minds, experien-
tial worlds, as they form and evolve within a nexus of living, relational
systems, are recognized as being exquisitely context sensitive and context
dependent. The Cartesian bifurcation is mended and inner and outer are
seen to interweave seamlessly. We believe that this post-Cartesian vision
will, in the new millennium, enable therapists and patients to continue
exploring hitherto uncharted regions of intersubjective space.

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REFERENCES
1. Stolorow R D , & Atwood G E (1992). Contexts of being: The intersubjective foundations of
psychological life. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
2. Stolorow RD, Atwood G E , & Orange D M (1999). Kohut and contextualism: Toward a post-
Cartesian psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 16, 380-388.
3. Mitchell SA (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Cambridge, M A : Harvard
University Press.
4. Aron L (1996). A meeting of minds: Mutuality in psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
5. Orange D M , Atwood G E , & Stolorow R D (1997). Working intersubjectively: Contextualism in
psychoanalytic practice. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

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