Research On George Atwood's Intersubjectivity Psychoanalysis Thought

George E.Atwood(1945-)is a famous American psychologist,one of the founders of intersubjective theory.He has made irreplaceable contributions to the establishment of the intersubjective theory in area of psychoanalytic theory and clinical treatment practice.Atwood put forward the concept of intersubjective field.He argued that the basic structure of personality is the organizing principles of individual experience,and development of personality refers to the structural process of individual experience.Atwood divided the unconscious into three types:pre-reflective unconscious,dynamic unconscious and unconfirmed unconscious,and held that the organizing principles was at the level of pre-reflective subconscious.Atwood phenomenologically interprets the themes of dream and delusion,trauma and empathy.He suggests that dreams are the heart of creative symbolism,and that delusion is a dream that lasting a long time in a state of personal annihilation.He believes that trauma is an unbearable and unspeakable experience.Individuals who have experienced trauma often split subjective experience when dealing with emotional trauma.Facing of extreme trauma,patients often purify the soul through dreams,freeze time in the subjective world and isolate themselves from others.Transference may be understood to refer to all the ways in which the patient’s experience of the analytic relationship becomes organized according to the configurations of self and other that unconsciously structure his or her subjective universe.Countertransference,in turn,refers to how the structures of the analyst’s subjectivity shape his or her experience of the analytic relationship and,in particular,of the patient’s transference.From the continual between transference and countertransference,Atwood put forward the concepts of intersubjective conjunction and intersubjective disjunction.Atwood thought the analysts’self-awareness and reflection on their own subjective world organization principles is important in the process.Atwood argues that madness(mental disorder)arises from the disappearance of relationships and associations,It is the experience of utter annihilation.The manic state of bipolar disorder is a state of creativity that comes from a possibility of oneself that has been crushed or lost.Atwood emphasized the effect of early parenting on depression and rejected the notion of endogenous depression.Atwood believes that suicide is a kind of obedience to the world’s denial of oneself.With regard to schizophrenia,he proposed that the specific phenomenon of schizophrenia is not caused in the internal pathology,but in a specific context of the intersubjective interaction.Atwood creatively explores the interwoven relationship between psychotherapy and philosophy by clinical cases.He believes that psychotherapy is a kind of humanistic science,and put forward three development directions of future psychotherapy:focusing on phenomenology;Extending psychotherapy practice to the extreme psychological disorders;Evolution of intersubjective psychotherapy in psychoanalysis.Atwood puts forward the principle of equality situation between psychoanalysts and patients,and points out that intersubjective psychotherapy is a process of unfolding,illumination and transformation patients’ subjective world.Atwood’s major contributions include constructing the intersubjective theory of psychoanalysis,forming a unique view of psychopathology,proposing the development direction of future psychotherapy,and enriching the practical experience and cases of intersubjective psychotherapy of psychoanalysis.Atwood’s main limitation was that there were few independent theoretical achievements,obvious supernatural tendencies,and lacking a complete system.