ABSTRACT

The long arc of Brandchaft’s career has allowed him to participate in virtually the entire course of modern psychoanalytic theory building. This chapter will describe several points in the evolution of Brandchaft’s thought when the spirit that animated his devotion to clinical work throughout his career led him to respectfully review and critique extant theory. Trained in the classical mode and completing his psychoanalytic training in the 1950s, when ego psychology reigned supreme, early on Brandchaft began to search for models that better captured the clinical situations he was encountering day to day. His experiences led him first to study British object relations, then to self psychology, and finally, with his closest collaborators, Robert Stolorow and George Atwood, to the development of the intersubjective perspective, now called intersubjective systems theory.