ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some key philosophical and hermeneutical issues and controversies which the three schools of thought bring to light. It also considers the problematic nature of empathy, subjectivity, and the self, a triumvirate of related concepts which both self psychologists and inter-subjectivists have regarded as foundations of psychoanalytic understanding. The chapter looks at an entirely different issue, namely, what happens in relational psychoanalysis when it makes a paradigm shift from individual psychology to one in which interactions are the primary phenomena, and individual "minds" emerge in the relational process. Self psychology and inter-subjectivity, each in its own way, rescued subjectivity and the self from what Paul Ricoeur famously called the hermeneutics of suspicion inculcated by Sigmund Freud and other modern thinkers. American pragmatic and democratic traditions trust mutual understanding, while modern European philosophical thought is a product and manifestation of radical disillusionment.
