Talking about talking: Interpersonal process recall as an intersubjective approach to research

Research methods are often marked by inequalities between researcher and researched, maintained through dominant discourses that structure expectations of research. This study considers how therapeutic skills such as reflexivity can help to develop alternative discourses, raise awareness and challenge inequalities in research. An approach to the qualitative analysis of research interviews using interpersonal process recall (IPR) is outlined. By focusing attention on the dialogue and enabling researcher and research participant to review and explore their interaction reflexively, IPR offers an opportunity to understand interviews as intersubjective events. It thus facilitates the collaborative identification of processes and narratives as key moments for further analysis and increases awareness of the potential blurring of genres between therapeutic and research conversations. The contribution of IPR to an intersubjective lens and greater equality in research interviewing is discussed. Potential implications for both research and therapy practices are suggested.     

Enactments: an intersubjective perspective.

We offer a critique and synthesis of classical and interpersonal views of enactment. From an intersubjective standpoint, the study of enactment leads to a reconsideration of the nature of the psychoanalytic process. And enactment becomes virtually synonymous with the psychoanalytic process. Enactments are interactions of analysand and analyst with communicative and resistive meanings that lead to valuable insight and can constitute corrective emotional experiences. Enactments that are recognized and defined become valuable dramatizing moments that have condensing, clarifying, and intensifying effects upon consciousness. The inevitable participation by the analyst in enactment is compatible with appropriate analytic discipline. A case will demonstrate these points.     

From object to subject: pastoral supervision as an intersubjective activity

The author sketches the development of psychoanalysis in terms of its trends from notions of objectivity to intersubjectivity and how this movement can inform contemporary pastoral supervision. The article argues that these same trends may be noted in the development of contemporary educational and theological theories.     

Unconscious perception and reverie: an intersubjective connection*

This paper discusses an intriguing topic for psychoanalysis: the concept of unconscious communication. Beginning with the concept of unconscious perception, it moves on to figurability and culminates with reverie. Auxiliary concepts, such as receptive unconscious, intersubjectivtiy, countertransferrence and empathy, are discussed in order to articulate the conceptual network on which theoretical arguments are based.     

Gestural sense-making: hand gestures as intersubjective linguistic enactments

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty??s dialectic of linguistic expression (2002)), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense (1989). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or ??linguistic?? convention (McNeill 1992, 2005), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making.     

Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness

Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggests how recognition is restored through surrender.     

Communication in early infancy: an arena of intersubjective learning

The present essay summarizes experimental, video-microanalytic and clinical aspects of the Papouseks' approach to early preverbal communication. The first section summarizes some of their video-microanalytic research on intuitive parenting and preverbal parent-infant communication. It describes the naturalistic preverbal learning context where infants learn and integrate experiences about themselves, the parent, their interrelatedness, and interactions with objects and events in the environment. The second section recapitulates research involving various kinds of experimental manipulations of the parents' communicative behavior and its effects on infant responses. The final section draws a bow to individual differences and what can be learned from the application of the still-face paradigm in clinical assessments of dysfunctional parent-infant communication.     

Supervising personality assessment: the integration of intersubjective and psychodynamic elements in the supervisory process

The supervision of personality assessment can be likened to the process of teaching art. Much like artistic training, supervision of personality assessment is a complex process that calls for creative integration of different working processes, some more technical and formal and others broader and more complex. On the surface, compared to psychotherapy supervision, supervision of personality assessment is fairly structured and centered on specific tasks such as scoring, making a diagnosis, or determining personality organization. Nevertheless, principles of psychodynamic psychotherapy such as parallel processes are relevant as well. We discuss the process of integrating intersubjective and psychodynamic elements into personality assessment supervision and argue that this integration helps the supervisory work to proceed effectively. We present the role of knowledge, the institution, and parallel processes in the supervisory work.     

Signs and the process of interpretation: sign as an object and as a process

Historically the words representation and symbol have had overlapping meanings, meanings that usually disregard the role played by the interpreter. Peirce’s theory of signs accounts for these meanings and also for the role of the interpreter. His theory draws attention to the static and dynamic nature of signs. Sign interpretation can be viewed as a continuous dynamic and evolving process. The static and dynamic nature of signs helps us understand the teaching–learning activity as a process of interpretation on the part of teacher and students. The paper attempts to explain the classroom interpretation process on the part of the actors involved using the Peircean theory of signs.     

Illegitimate tasks as assessed by incumbents and supervisors: converging only modestly but predicting strain as assessed by incumbents,supervisors, and partners

ABSTRACT

Illegitimate tasks are tasks that violate norms about what an employee can reasonably be expected to do. Representing a relatively recent stressor concept, illegitimate tasks have been linked to strain, but so far have been assessed only by self-report. The current multisource study investigates to what extent supervisors’ assessments of illegitimate tasks converge with incumbents’ self-reports of illegitimate tasks and predict three kinds of strain, namely psychological strain (incumbent report of exhaustion), behavioural strain (supervisors report of incivility), and family strain (partner report of work-family conflict). Low convergence between assessments was expected due to idiosyncratic appraisals but also to differing perspectives of supervisors and incumbents due to their roles, as described by the newly developed roles-as-perspectives theory proposed in this paper. Data from 166 triads were analysed by structural equation modelling and Relative Weight Analysis. Results showed that convergence between incumbent and supervisor reports of illegitimate tasks was rather low; it was higher when the supervisor had a limited span of control. Illegitimate tasks were associated with all three types of strain for both self- and supervisor reports of illegitimate tasks, indicating that the detrimental effects of illegitimate tasks cannot be explained by common method biases alone and that incumbents and supervisors have overlapping but not identical concepts of illegitimate tasks.     

How objectivity undermines the study of personhood: Toward an intersubjective epistemology for psychological science

As a science, psychology embraces the value of objectivity. An objective observation is one that is (a) based upon publically observable phenomena (i.e., overt behavior); (b) unbiased, in the sense that it records only what was observed, without either adding or taking away from the observation, and (c) an accurate representation of the world as it truly is. To understand the person, however, it is necessary to come to grips with seemingly elusive concepts such as agency, symbolism, experience, meaning, inter-subjectivity, and morality. Such concepts make reference to phenomena that are not observable in way that one can observe objects in the physical world of space and time. In this paper, I examine how psychology's commitment to objectivity obscures our ability to understand persons. A remnant of the Cartesian distinction between a mind and body, the principle of objectivity forces psychologists to seek “objective” indicators of “subjective” processes. Following Wittgenstein and recent research on the mirror resonance system, I argue that psychological knowledge arises neither from within (subjectively) nor from without (objectively), but instead from between (intersubjectively). To understand what it means to be a person, we must abandon the false distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and embrace an epistemology based on intersubjectivity.     

Constructivism and education: education as an interpretative transformational process

This paper provides an analysis of the ideas of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead with regards the relationship between experience, meaning, language and thinking. It discusses how experience, meaning, language and thinking are based on the creative and constructive actions of individuals. Unlike what is the case in so-called radical constructivism, it is argued that the actions of the individual should be understood in a transactional way. The paper shows the implication of a transactional constructivism for education, arguing that education is the medium in which the creative and constructive actions of individuals come together in a social environment.     

Recognizing Spirituality as an Important Factor in Counselor Supervision

Despite the recent, growing emphasis on spirituality in the counseling and psychotherapy literature, information regarding spirituality and the supervision process is limited. The purpose of this article is to help supervisors and supervisees enhance awareness of spiritual values in supervision. Factors such as counselor competency, conceptualization of spirituality, cross‐cultural awareness, and the similarity of clients' and counselors' values form a foundation for developing effective intervention and supervision strategies. A series of research questions is proposed to spur a program of empirical exploration.     

Agency and the Other: On the intersubjective roots of self-identity

The essay argues that a systematic reconstruction of the intersubjective grounds of self-consciousness and self-identity will yield a complex non-reductive notion of agency. Core features of human agency include intentional causality, conscious understanding thereof, as well as the capacity to distinguish self-caused from externally caused phenomena. By analyzing how self-consciousness emerges from intersubjective perspective-taking and dialogue, a socially embedded and symbolically mediated notion of self-identity—one which is able to preserve the core features of human agency—becomes viable. G.H. Mead’s work serves as heuristic framework to articulate the extent to which the Other’s irreducible agency is constitutive of the self’s capacity to establish an identity, now understood as a socially situated narrative self-interpreting process. Self-identity reveals to be an essential open yet not fragmented dynamic, a socially situated yet agent-driven phenomenon, and ethically indebted to the Other as providing the essential gift of selfhood.     

Interactive alignment as an allostatic process: A literature review

Research on interactive alignment encompasses various perspectives, including the recognition of linguistic coordination patterns, mental representation processes between interlocutors, and linguistic and behavioral convergence. In the absence of a literature review that presents the advances in the study of interactive alignment, this study identified 64 theoretical and empirical articles developed over 25 years (1996–2021) following the PRISMA methodology. Methodological and theoretical aspects derived from the analysis of the aforementioned reports are presented, showing how synchronization parameters interact, the associated neural bases, the impact of alignment on the development of joint actions, cognitive load, social interactions in general, and the prediction of language. The discussion and conclusions analyze the information presented and propose a comprehensive analysis from an allostatic perspective (predictive regulation through change) to advance the understanding of interactive alignment.     

Lying and intersubjective truth: A communication based approach to understanding lying

This project was undertaken as a response to a perceived deficiency regarding the role of communication in a large block of the phenomenological discourse on lying. The arguments presented here attempt to make the communication process an explicit, rather than an implicit component of this discussion. First, a lie is explained as a communicative act that is identified by making a simple comparison between two contradictory realities, the reality presented by the lie, and some sort of true reality. Existing discussions of lying are examined and judged to be deficient because they limit their explanations of this true reality to subjective and objective standards of truth. Intersubjectivity is presented as an alternative truth standard, and it is argued that lies can only be discovered and understood through a process of interpretation or negotiation (dialogue) by human interactants.