Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature brings to light the deep sense of crisis within the profession of academic philosophy which is similar to the paralyzing pluralism in contemporary theology and the inveterate indeterminacy of literary criticism. Richard Rorty's provocative and profound meditations impel philosophers to examine the problematic status of their discipline— only to discover that modern European philosophy has come to an end. Rorty strikes a deathblow to modern European philosophy by telling a story about the emergence, development and decline of its primary props: the correspondence theory of truth, the notion of privileged representations and the idea of a self-reflective transcendental subject. Rorty's fascinating tale—his-story —is regulated by three fundamental shifts which he delineates in detail and promotes in principle: the move toward anti-realism or conventionalism in ontology, the move toward the demythologizing of the Myth of the Given or anti-foundationalism in epistemology, and the move toward detranscendentalizing the subject or dismissing the mind as a sphere of inquiry. The chief importance of Rorty's book is that it brings together in an original and intelligible narrative the major insights of the patriarchs of postmodern American philosophy—W. V. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Nelson Goodman— and persuasively presents the radical consequences of their views for contemporary philosophy. Rorty credits Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey for having "brought us into a period of 'revolutionary' philosophy" by undermining the prevailing Cartesian and Kantian paradigms and advancing new conceptions of philosophy. And these monumental figures surely inspire Rorty. Yet, Rorty's philosophical debts—the actual sources of his particular anti-Cartesian and antiKantian arguments—are Quine's holism, Sellars' anti-foundationalism, and Goodman's pluralism. In short, despite his adamant attack on analytical philosophy—the last stage of modern European philosophy—Rorty feels most comfortable with the analytical form of philosophical argumentation (shunned by Wittgenstein and Heidegger). From the disparate figures of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, Rorty gets a historicist directive: to eschew the quest for certainty and the search for foundations.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggests how recognition is restored through surrender.

Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness.

Moses and Monotheism

Écrits: A Selection

In this assessment of the various dimensions of mutuality in psychoanalysis, the author contends that the relational approach is a useful guide to issues of technique and therapeutic strategy, and accepts the clinical responsibilities of a postmodern critique of psychoanalytic foundations.

A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis

Relational psychoanalysis: The emergence of a tradition.

This article highlights the analysis of the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity in the psychoanalytic situation. Just as psychoanalytic theory has focused on the mother exclusively as the object of the infant's needs while ignoring the subjectivity of the mother, so, too, psychoanalysis has considered the analyst only as an object while neglecting the subjectivity of the analyst as the analyst is experienced by the patient. The analyst's subjectivity is an important element in the analytic situation, and the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity needs to be made conscious. Patients seek to connect to their analysts, to know them, to probe beneath their professional facade, and to reach their psychic centers much in the same way that children seek to connect to and penetrate their parents’ inner worlds. The exploration of the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity represents one underemphasized aspect of the analysis of transference, and it is an essential aspect of ...

The patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity

The author examines the notion of the third within contemporary intersubjectivity theory. He utilizes a variety of metaphors (the triangle, the seesaw, strange attractors, and the compass) in an effort to explain this often misunderstood concept in a clear and readily usable manner. An argument is made to the effect that intersubjectivity theory has direct implications for clinical practice, and that the notion of the third is particularly useful in understanding what happens in and in resolving clinical impasses and stalemates. Specifically, the author suggests that certain forms of self-disclosure are best understood as attempts to create a third point of reference, thus opening up psychic space for self-reflection and mentalization. He provides a clinical case as well as a number of briefer vignettes to illustrate the theoretical concepts and to suggest specific modifications of the psychoanalyst's stance that give the patient greater access to the inner workings of the analyst's mind. This introduces a third that facilitates the gradual transformation from relations of complementarity to relations of mutuality.

Analytic impasse and the third: Clinical implications of intersubjectivity theory

This paper elaborates a “relational‐perspectivist”; view of interpretation as a complex intersubjective process that develops conjointly between patient and analyst. Interpretation is the principal process by which analysts position and reposition themselves interpersonally in relation to their patients, and in this sense interpretations contain aspects of the analyst's subjectivity that are made available for use by the patient. Inasmuch as the analyst has captured aspects of the patient's psychic life in a particular interpretation and insofar as the interpretation also expresses aspects of the analyst's subjectivity, interpretation is best thought of as the quintessential container and purveyor of intersubjectivity between patient and analyst. The paper defines two dimensions of the analytic process, symmetry‐asymmetry, referring to the similarity or dissimilarity of the patient's and analyst's roles and functions in the analytic process, and mutuality‐lack of mutuality, referring to how reciprocal the...

Lewis Aron

Papers

A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis

Relational psychoanalysis: The emergence of a tradition.

The patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity

Analytic impasse and the third: Clinical implications of intersubjectivity theory

Interpretation as expression of the analyst's subjectivity