ABSTRACT
Developmentally, recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system give rise to principles that unconsciously organize subsequent emotional and relational experiences. Such organizing principles are unconscious, not in the sense of being repressed but in being prereflective: they ordinarily do not enter the domain of reflective self-awareness. These intersubjectively derived, prereflective organizing principles are the basic building blocks of personality development, and their totality constitutes one's character. The intersubjective context plays a constitutive role in all forms of psychopathology, and clinical phenomena cannot be comprehended psychoanalytically apart from the intersubjective field in which they crystallize. S. Freud's psychoanalysis expanded the Cartesian mind, Descartes's "thinking thing," to include a vast unconscious realm. Developmental trauma originates within a formative intersubjective context whose central feature is malattunement to painful affect—a breakdown of the child–caregiver inter-affective system, leading to the child's loss of affect-integrating capacity and thereby to an unbearable, overwhelmed, disorganized state.
