ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to further grapple with the tension between a one-person and two-person psychology that relational psychoanalysis seeks to elaborate. It suggests that experiences of joy potentiate the development and/or deepening of intersubjectivity and that intersubjectivity can shift and deepen experiences of joy. Many psychoanalytic theorists have posed that the human condition is characterized by the desire to stand separate and the need to be attached. For Benjamin, the crisis is also a source of pleasure in the discovery of the other and of the affective connection that discovery affords. Benjamin states that the rapprochement crisis is first experienced as a conflict of wills. Eva would experience her separateness from her daughters as being out in the middle of the ocean without land in sight and no life jacket or life raft. The interplay of joy and intersubjectivity has the hallmarks of E. Fromm's productiveness.
