ABSTRACT
The intersubjective ego psychology of Loewald and Erikson initiates an American independent tradition in psychoanalysis. This recapitulation discusses intersubjectivity, analytic attitude, and the clinically sociocultural. It provides brief clinical vignettes and observations. The American independent tradition is an ego psychology that recognizes interpersonal-cultural psychoanalysis. It points toward psychoanalytic ear–clinical listening–and sociological eye–society and culture in the unconscious.
The American independent tradition focuses on the individual and individuality. Its technique includes close surface listening; listening to rather than listening for; waiting, curiosity, and uncertainty; and witnessing. It bears a family resemblance to the British independent tradition in its doubled legacy, its Loewaldian centering on the patient, and its one-person view of transference as what the unconscious brings to consciousness. Individuality includes identity, culture, and history in the unconscious. Via Erikson, the tradition recognizes and values intrapsychic “local knowledge”: unconscious self-location in and transference toward familial, cultural, and historico-generational worlds. Whereas the social sciences tend to have a thin understanding of individuality, psychoanalysis requires complex theories of society and culture. The methodology-epistemology of psychoanalysis overlaps with that of the qualitative-intersubjective social sciences. The chapter recalls Freud’s sociopolitical theories, Erikson’s and Loewald’s attention to intrapsychic culture and history, and the missing connections between the social sciences and psychoanalysis.
