The Risk of Relatedness

This book employs longstanding psychoanalytic concepts—neutrality, empathy, affect, trauma and the transference—to describe the clinical stance of intersubjectivity theory. This stance eschews formal technical rules, such that the psychotherapeutic process is determined instead by the uniqueness of the intersubjective field and the minute interplay of the two subjectivities involved. Jaenicke reformulates intersubjectivity theory's complexities into the terms of practical psychotherapeutic work to illustrate how depth of involvement and the risk inherent in interaction at such a depth—the 'risk of relatedness'—are pivotal: the outcome of psychotherapy is viewed as dependent on the development of patient and therapist both. Numerous case studies exemplify the dynamism and therapeutic challenge of the intersubjective field.