Two ways of being

The Dwelling Places of Self-Experience

“…To reduce the problem of such multiple meanings, I prefer to use the term interpsychic in place of the term intersubjective when referring in particular to the idea of a perceived locus of psychic life, one that involves images of a subjective self and a subjective other. 5 Incidentally, at another site one might be more inclined to take oneself as a subject and, at another, more as an object-or, for that matter, one could hold a "self-reflexive" perspective at that particular site, fluidly shifting between the two perspectives (Bach, 1998;Aron, 2000).…”

Narcissistic states of privilege.

“…Narcissistic dynamics involve impingements in the fluent transition and transitionality between subjective and objective states of awareness (Bach, 1975, 1984, 1985, 1994, 1998, 2019). Subjective awareness conceptualizes being the subject of experience, within which one feels “totally into ourselves and our feelings while the rest of the world is in the background” (Bach, 1998, p. 658). Objective awareness captures the mode of observational perspective taking, as if viewing self and experience as an object.…”

States of self-surrender.

“…In a series of articles published over the last few decades (Bach, 1975, 1977, 1994, 1998, 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2008, 2011, 2016; Bach & Schwartz, 1972), I have suggested that although there are many ways of conceptualizing and organizing states of consciousness, I find it clinically useful to think of them in terms of the actor’s subjectivity, which I call subjective awareness , or of the spectator’s self-observational awareness, that is, in terms of these dual abilities to be both the subject and the object, both the experiencer and also the observer of one’s own states. At the extreme of being the subjective actor, we are totally immersed in our own self experience, a state of self-absorption and obliviousness to the other that may be related to extremes of depression or of elation and mania.…”