RDS:
In retrospect, I regret that we named our perspective intersubjective-systems
theory, an appellation that has really caught on. Our original name,
psychoanalytic phenomenology, better captures our assiduous devotion to
phenomenological inquiry—a devotion grounding all of our important discoveries
and formulations, including the context-embeddedness of all aspects of
emotional experience and disturbance. Perhaps phenomenological contextualism
captures it all.
GEA:
Why do we need to give our perspective a name? Do we have to describe our ideas
as an “ism”? Please, no more “isms.” I think of our work as a set of proposals
and possibilities rather than as any kind of coherent system or defined school
of thought. It is a partial scaffolding at most, an incomplete structure to be
developed further by those following in our phenomenological footsteps. Our
life work is kind of like the bounty hunter played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio
Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy—“the man with no name.” We are the nameless bounty
hunters of contemporary psychoanalysis, wandering toward an uncertain future. I
propose we leave it at that.
Stolorow,
Robert D., Atwood, George, E. The Power of Phenomenology: Psychoanalytic and
Philosophical Perspectives (p. 130). Taylor and Francis. 2018, Kindle edition.
