Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice endeavors to ground intersubjective psychoanalysis in a larger philosophical context, largely that found in the writings of Aristotle, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Bakhtin. This version of intersubjectivity theory has been articulated by Stolorow, Atwood, Brandshaft, and Orange in four earlier volumes. Intersubjectivity "views psychoanalysis as the dialogic attempt of two people together to understand one person's organization of emotional experience by making sense together of their intersubjectively configured experience" (p. 5). The authors conclude that if "we can identify the contexts that have led to a particular experiential organization, we can play with it, question it, and experiment with its reorganization" (p. 90). These authors, both in the current volume and in those that have preceded it, have expanded self psychology from a "one-person" to a relational perspective. The authors do not discuss, however, how their intersubjectivity theory differs from that of Benjamin (1995), another relational psychoanalyst.The authors are to be commended for the readability of the text and the absence of questionable metapsychology and jargon. Even the empirical psychologists they appear to eschew will find few concepts with which to find fault. Psychologists of any stripe will likely not disagree with the ideas of unconscious organizing principles or the threat of psychological annihilation. The authors also are to be applauded for using the term "co-transference" instead of "transference" and "countertransference,"

Adopting a post-Cartesian, intersubjective viewpoint that focuses on the interplay of worlds of experience leads to an opening up of the most severe ranges of psychopathology-the so-called psychoses-to psychoanalytic understanding and treatment. A Cartesian theory, inevitably preoccupied with the individual mind and its contact with a stable external reality, cannot encompass experiences of extreme self-loss and of the disintegration of the world. A sketch is offered of varieties of the experience of personal annihilation within an intersubjective, phenomenological framework of understanding. Features of the intersubjective fields typically associated with delusional states, manic episodes, and extreme trauma are discussed.

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The recent focus on mutual recognition in contemporary psychoanalysis has several roots: infant research, self psychology, feminism, Hegel, and Winnicott. This article argues that recognition is best understood as a type of acknowledgment and acceptance of our mutual vulnerability in the treatment process. It also suggests that resituating Winnicott's "use of an object" in the larger context of his work reframes it as the exception rather than the rule, and shifts the destruction approach to recognition toward an appreciation approach.