INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY

Dec 22, 2010

KC

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THE TWO PERSPECTIVES

• 1. THEORIES OF THE SELF AND OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES
• 2. 人文精神的憩息之所 (P-H-E)

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THE TWO DIMENSIONS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

• object relations self

issues development

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• no way out                             no way to go 
• complexes to work through  leverage for

change 

• through the labyrinth             exit of the labyrinth
• reverie as possible  appreciation &

(therapist) blessing (therapist)

. H (Entering the circle) P / E

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Intersubjectivity Theory

• 1. I regard intersubjectivity theory as the most important post-Kohutian theoretical development.
• 2. A reading experience: interestingly, one can only start appreciating the works of Stolorow and Atwood, when one comes across the other authors who also write about intersubjectivity, e.g. Orange, Buirski, Jaenicke.
• 3. Experience is definitely existential, and is much more than affect (which belongs to psychology).
• 4. Is there a good illustration of intersubjectivity in practice?

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Robert D. Stolorow, PhD

• He is the author of Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (2007), and coauthor of Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis (2002), Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice (1997), Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (1992), Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach (1987), Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology (1984), Psychoanalysis of Developmental Arrests: Theory and Treatment (1980), and Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (1979).

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Robert D. Stolorow

• He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Harvard University in 1970 and his Certificate in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy from the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, New York City, in 1974. ��He also received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Riverside in 2007. He holds diplomas both in Clinical Psychology and in Psychoanalysis from the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). In 1995 he received the Distinguished Scientific Award from the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association, in which he is a Fellow.�

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My Long-Distance Friendship With Heinz Kohut (Stolorow, 2010)

• I never studied with Heinz Kohut, never attended one of his seminars or workshops at the Chicago Institute, and never consulted with him about a patient or about myself. He was not my guru or my mentor. He was my friend --- a friend with whom I felt a strong intellectual kinship and whom I admired greatly, although I by no means always agreed with him. (IJPSP, 5:177-183, 2010)

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The Book Review of “The Restoration of the Self” (Storolow, 1978)

• What was intensely verifying for me was that Kohut (1959), by studying the relation between mode of observation and theory in psychoanalysis, had come to exactly the same conclusion that Atwood and I (1979) had arrived at independently by studying the subjective origins of psychological theories --- namely, that psychoanalysis, at all levels of abstraction and generality, should be a depth psychology of personal experience.

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Kohut’s letter to Stolorow (Jan 7, 1978)

• Your review of my book … gave me a good deal of pleasure, but also much more. To see that somebody who lives in another city (NY), who has had no personal contact with me could so completely and accurately grasp the meaning of my message, is even more important to me than the praise that you bestowed on my efforts. Thank you for putting you fine mind so successfully to the task, and thank you for the generosity and courage that allowed you to be so open, direct, and unambivalent.

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The Last Visit to Carmel (Aug 20, 1981)

• He was very emaciated and obviously deathly ill. … He tried to have a photograph taken of the two of us with the camera set on automatic, but he ruined the film while loading it, so I went out and bought another roll of film, and the photograph was successfully taken.

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• He took me to lunch somewhere in Carmel Valley, and the ride to the restaurant with him driving the car was particularly memorable. At one point I was disagreeing with him about some theoretical issue, and he slapped me on the leg and, with what seemed to me to be mock exasperation, exclaimed, “Bob, you’re a reluctant self psychologist!”

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• Then he corrected himself, voicing encouragement in the way that I had come to know to be characteristic of him, saying, “No, it’s very important that you have your own ideas.”

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Berkeley (Oct, 1981)

• … He died 4 days later. My first day back at my university office in NY after his death, I found in my mail the photograph of us that had been taken in Carmel, along with a note from him calling it “a nice reminder of your visit on Aug 20”. I have been told that this photograph may have been the last one taken of Kohut. It seemed that it was important to him to put it in the mail to me before he died.

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• In a note to me dated Nov 12, 1981, composed after Kohut’s memorial service, his widow, Betty, wrote:
• I’m sure Heinz told you, either directly or indirectly, how much you meant to him and how he admired you because, while understanding his work, you went about your own.

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• Following Kohut’s death, I experienced a writer’s block for several months. Whenever I sat down to write, I felt paralyzed with exhaustion. After several months of this block, I had a dream that resolved it. I was with Kohut in his study in Carmel, and he was very sick. I said, “Heinz, you look so tired. Maybe you should lie down and rest.”

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• When I woke up from this dream, I realized that I had been trying to deal with the loss of my friend by forming an identification with his state of being as he was dying. Understanding this, I could write again.

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Intersubjectivity Theory

• I regard intersubjectivity theory as the most important post-Kohutian theoretical development.

• A reading experience: interestingly, one can only start appreciating the works of Stolorow and Atwood, when one comes across the other authors who also write about intersubjectivity, e.g. Orange, Buirski, Jaenicke.

• Experience is definitely existential, and is much more than affect (which belongs to psychology), e.g. Janusz Korczak.

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The Umschlagplatz

• In the Holocaust, the Umschlagplatz (German: collection point or reloading point) in the Warsaw Ghetto was where Jews gathered for deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp.

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• During the Grossaktion Warsaw, beginning on July 22, 1942, Jews were deported in crowded freight cars to Treblinka. On some days as many as 7,000 Jews were deported. An estimated 265,000 Warsaw Jews were taken to the Treblinka gas chambers, and some sources describe it as the largest killing of any single community in World War II. The deportations ended on September 12, 1942.��

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“The very stones of the street wept at the sight of the procession.“ (Joshua Perle)

• One day, around 5th August when I had take a brief rest from work and was walking down Gesia Street, I happened to see Janusz Korczak and his orphans leaving the ghetto. The evacuation of the Jewish orphanage run by Janusz Korczak had been ordered for that morning. The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children and now, on this last journey he could not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful.

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• At last they would be able exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two nicely dressed and in a happy mood. The little column was led by an SS man who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next world. He took a special liking to a boy of twelve, a violinist who had his instrument under his arm.

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• The SS man told him to go to the head of the procession of children and play – and so they set off. When I met them in Gesia Street the smiling children were singing in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest infants, who were beaming too, and telling them some amusing story. I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, ‘it's all right, children, it will be all right’. So that at least he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death. (The Pianist, Władysław Szpilman)

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WORLDS OF EXPERIENCE: INTERWEAVING PHILOSOPHICAL AND CLINICAL DIMENSIONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS (ROBERT STOLOROW, GEORGE ATWOOD, DONNA ORANGE, 2002)�

• Our aim here is twofold: first, to expose and deconstruct the assumptions, largely a legacy of Descartes’s philosophy, that have undergirded traditional and much contemporary psychoanalytic thinking; and second, to lay the foundations for a post-Cartesian psychoanalytic psychology grounded in intersubjective contextualism. … A WORK OF PHILOSOPHY OF MIND …

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Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Stephen Gaukroger, 1995)

• Gaukroger described Descartes (1596-1960) as having had a persistent tendency toward melancholia and paranoia, linking this disposition to the loss of his mother and his home, and to the later separation from and loss of his grandmother. Could these early upheavals in his life have been the source of his lifelong need for something unassailably certain, something that would be absolutely solid and secure?

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• In Descartes’s philosophy, certainty and security are finally found, not in the relationships with other human beings but rather in the isolated workings of his own mind, envisioned as a rational, self-contained, self-sufficient entity.

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Befindlichkeit

• Heidegger’s word for affectivity --- Befindlichkeit --- literally translated as “how-one-finds-oneself-ness” … both how one feels and the situation within which one is feeling, a felt sense of oneself in a situation, prior to a Cartesian split between inside and outside … underscores the exquisite context-dependence and context-sensitivity of human emotional life …

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• It is our contention that a shift in psychoanalytic thinking from the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective systems.

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• Grasping the motivational primacy of affectivity --- Befindlichkeit --- enables us to contextualize a wide range of psychological phenomena that have traditionally been the focus of psychoanalytic inquiry, including psychic conflict, trauma, transference and resistance, unconsciousness, and the therapeutic action of psychoanalytic interpretation.

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From Cartesian Minds to Experiential Worlds

The Cartesian Mind:

• The myth of the isolated mind
• The infamous subject-object split
• The contrast between inner and outer
• The Cartesian mind craves clarity and distinctness
• Its reliance on deductive logic
• The absence of temporality
• Ideas are copies or representations of things
• Concept of mind as substance

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The infamous subject-object split�

• Idealism took many forms: the immaterialism of Berkeley’s esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), the transcendental idealism of Kant, and the absolute idealism of Fichte and Hegel. In each of these views only the mental was fully or primordially real. On the other side, empiricists like Locke, Hume, and Mill claimed that mind was illusory or at best derivative. In 20^th century psychology this view was taken to the extreme, eventuating in behaviorism; among philosophers it is often known as “eliminative materialism,” wherein what is “eliminated” in the picture of human life is everything except its physical aspects. The whole dispute, however, depends on a full acceptance of the Cartesian premise of the subject-object split.

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�The Cartesian mind craves clarity and distinctness�

• The need for Cartesian clear and distinct ideas often appears in psychology as reductionism, the “it all comes down to” approach. … Only a contrite “fallibilism” --- Charles Sanders Peirce’s word for a questioning attitude toward our own theories and formulations --- and a devotion to dialogue with the possessors of other perspectives can help us to “make our ideas clear” without falling into the Cartesian search for simplicity that leads to reductionism.
• We see both hermeneutics and fallibilism as powerful antidotes to Cartesian thinking, as did their more famous proponents, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Peirce.

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�Experiential Worlds�

• An intersubjective field, the central theoretical construct of intersubjective theory, is defined as “a system composed of differently organized, interacting subjective worlds.” (Stolorow, et al, 1987)
• Philosophical sources for the concept of an experiential world include Heidegger (1927), Husserl (1936) (Lebenswelt, lifeworld), Merleau-Ponty (1945) (etre-au monde, being-toward-the-world), and Wittgenstein (1953, 1958, 1961) (contexts of meaning, language games, and forms of life).

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�Experiential Worlds�

• The experiential world seems to be both inhabited by and inhabiting of the human being.
• In contrast to the “punctual self,” (Taylor, 1989) (The idea of an individual isolated as a point in space from other human beings and from the natural world. Such a point in space is atemporal and thus has no developmental history, no story to tell), or Cartesian subject, the experiential world is historical, temporal, and emergent. … clocks and calendars do not provide good metaphors here … Biological systems may provide a better analogy. … There is a plant in Crete that grows like a cactus for 20 years, flowers once, and dies that year …

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World Horizons: An Alternative to the Freudian Unconscious

• …the Freudian unconscious remained deeply saturated with the very Cartesianism to which it posed a challenge … the Freudian unconscious and its contents are but a sealed-off underground chamber within the Cartesian isolated mind …

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World Horizons

• We begin not with a Cartesian isolated mind-entity equipped with conscious, preconscious, and unconscious compartments, but with the concept of a multiply contextualized experiential world --- a cornerstone of our intersubjective perspective.
• … the rigidity associated with various kinds of psychopathology can be regarded as a kind of freezing of a person’s experiential horizons so that other perspectives remain unavailable … 對話中 學習原本不知道的新事物新觀念 開啟新的視野 遂第一次認識這原本以為熟悉的地方 遂第一次回到了家 …

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Kohut and Contextualism

• … a portrait of Kohut as a pivotal transitional figure in the development of a post-Cartesian, fully contextual psychoanalytic psychology.
• If it was the investigation of the subjective origins of psychoanalytic theories that led us to phenomenology, it was the commitment to phenomenology, in turn, that led us ultimately to the recognition of a thoroughly contextualized subjectivity. … Subjectivity, as we came to realize, can only be the experience of a historically situated subject. … Freud’s intrapsychic determinism gives way to a thoroughgoing intersubjective contexualism.

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The Windowless Monads

• … the variant of contextualism to which Kohut was led by his turn to phenomenology was, in essence, a contextualization of narcissism, a theoretical contribution that opened a path, barred by Cartesian thought, to the psychoanalytic investigation and understanding of experiences of personal annihilation … As a result of this contextualization of narcissism, the “windowless monads” of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz were able to find some windows. The bad news, as we shall see, is that fundamentally they remained monads.

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Some Knotty Problems

• As useful and pathbreaking as his contextualization of narcissism may have been, Kohut’s (1977) subsequent elevation of his psychology of narcissism to a metapsychology of the total personality --- a psychoanalytic psychology of the self --- has created some knotty problems …

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• Self psychology’s unidimentionality, the exclusive focus on the narcissistic or selfobject dimension of experience and of transference --- its establishment, disruption, and repair --- has tended to become reductive, neglecting and failing to contextualize other important dimensions.

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• Even more problematic has been the insidious movement from phenomenology to ontology, from experience to entities … self as fluidly evolving dimension of experience taking form within an ongoing contextual matrix is replaced by self as an objectified, supraordinate, agentic entity, an ontic being equipped with poles and a tension arc, and initiating actions to restore its own compromised cohesion …

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• The Cartesian isolated mind returns here in the Romantic vision of a prinstine nuclear self, with its inherent preprogrammed design, awaiting a responsive milieu that will enable it to unfold.
• As Howard Bacal and Kenneth Newman (1990) have pointed out, Kohut seemed reluctant to consider his framework a relational or two-person theory, probably because he wanted to preserve its link to the intrapsychic (and thus Cartesian) tradition of Freudian psychoanalysis and to prevent its being characterized as an interpersonal or social psychology.

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• Despite these significant advances, remnants of a Cartesian objectivist epistemology persisted in Kohut’s thinking, specifically in his conceptualization of analytic empathy … The empathic stance could never be a neutral one …

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�Perspectivism (Perspective Realism)�

• Cartesian isolated-mind thinking in psychoanalysis has historically been associated with a technical rationality and an objectivist epistemology. … while we have characterized the shift, through which psychoanalytic knowing becomes contextualized, as a form of perspectivism or perspective realism.

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• Whereas Schleiermacher believed that a text can be interpreted by empathically entering the inner world of its author, Gadamer holds that such interpretation can only be from a perspective embedded in the historically matrix of the interpreter’s own traditions. (Donnel Stern, 1997)

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��Cartesian Trends in Relational Psychoanalysis� �

• In the last 2 decades, efforts to create a post-Cartesian psychoanalytic theory are Kohutian self psychology, the intersubjective theory, and American relational theory (Stephen Mitchell and Aron).
• Despite the important efforts of Mitchell, Aron, and other relational thinkers to recast psychoanalytic theory as a contextual psychology, relational psychoanalysis has, in significant ways, remained caught in the grip of the very Cartesianism it has sought to subvert.

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• … the relational psychoanalysts are caught between two incompatible philosophical worlds … one is the world Freud inherited from Descartes, a world of Archimedean certainty and clear objectivity, in which isolated-mind entities are radically estranged from external others … the other is the world of post-Cartesian contexualism, which recognizes the constitutive role of relatedness in the making of all experience …

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• Relational theorists have tried to combine, reconcile, and preserve elements of these two worlds by claiming that they can coexist in some form of dialectical relationship …we believe that such efforts, although appealing, cannot succeed, because these two philosophical worlds are fundamentally incommensurable … we must choose …

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��Perspectival Realism and Intersubjective Systems� �

• “Since none of us can entirely escape the confines of our personal perspective, our view of truth is necessarily partial, but conversation can increase our access to the whole. … Perspectival realism recognizes that the only truth or reality to which psychoanalysis provides access is the subjective organization of experience understood in an intersubjective context. … We never fully attain or know this reality but we continually approach, apprehend, articulate, and participate in it … In such a moderate realism, the real is an emergent, self-correcting process only partly accessible via personal subjectivity but increasingly understandable in communitarian dialogue.” (Emotional Understanding: Studies in Psychoanalytic Epistemology, by Donna Orange, 1995, pp. 61-62)

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• Our own influences, include early phenomenologists such as Brentano and Husserl, for whom a perspective always means a perspective on something (intentionality). This is no view from nowhere, but neither is there perspective without something on which to take a point of view. In addition, we are indebted for our pragmatic realism to Peirce for his idea of fallibilism. The advocates of dialogic understanding and of communicative praxis --- Gadamer and Habermas --- are further influences. More recently, in Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy, we have found further inspiration.

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Perspective Realism in Clinical Work

• The focus on organizing principles, central themes, or emotional convictions that characterize a person’s experiential world.
• Self-reflexivity: a constant awareness of our presence, with all our history and prejudices, in the process of understanding the other; aware that our theories embody our own historically shaped emotional convictions and themes, we must hold lightly whatever perspective we may have on the patient’s troubles and remain ready to question our cherished theories of human nature.
• There will be no arguments about reality. … our task is to hold our own perspectives as lightly as we can so that the other’s words can speak to us.

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The journey has not ended …

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• The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice, by Donna M. Orange, Routledge, June 2011
• Qualitative Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy, 2 ed, by John McLeod, Dec 2010
• Case Study Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy, by John McLeod, Sep 2010

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Entering the circle …

• Three phases in interpretive inquiry: (1) entering the hermeneutic circle in the right way: discovering an appropriate workable perspective from which interpretation can proceed (2) the conduct of inquiry within that perspective (3) critical reflection upon and evaluation of the interpretive account that is the outcome of inquiry. (Entering the Circle: Hermeneutic Investigation in Psychology, ed by Martin Packer, Richard Addison, SUNY, 1989, p. 3)

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A few words …

• (1) 詮釋學是人文精神重建的基礎
• (2) 互為主體性理論 本質上為詮釋學的實踐
• (3) 疏離(alienation)之定義為 失去脈絡(context)的存在狀態
• (4) 工具理性的極度發展 與疏離有關 遂隱含極度非理性的反撲
• (5) 臨床所見最瑰麗悚人之精神病理現象 率皆在此範疇
• (6) 精神分析誕生於此
• (7) 但精神分析本身屬上述症狀的一部份 並不打算 或無法帶來救贖�

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• (8) Now 互為主體性理論 欲與狼共舞
• (9) 如何與狼共舞
• (10)漂亮的共舞 須兼顧 一和二的細緻之處(the intricacies of one and two)
• (11)還有 互為主體性理論 因其源自詮釋學 遂無法迴避知識論上的質疑

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• (12)我們遂回到如下諸versus�human studies vs. natural sciences�verstehen (understanding) vs. erklaren (explanation)�idiographic vs. nomothetic�qualitative vs. quantitative�two-person psychology vs. one-person psychology

iterative hermeneutic circle vs. linear logic reasoning

�(To understand any given part, you look to the whole; to understand the whole, you look to the parts. This has been criticized from a logical perspective, because of its inherent circularity. In analytic terms, however, it describes the processes of interpretation very effectively and speaks to a dynamic, non-linear, style of thinking.) (Jonathan Smith, et al., 2010, p. 28) 所以知識論的質疑的關鍵在詮釋學的循環

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• (13)有趣的當代理論 率皆在上述versus中爭扎

(14)詮釋學為 看待人世之基本態度 屬歷史感甚深 人文誠意甚篤的 溫煦的哲學�(15)回到現象 回到經驗 回到沉默的見證 回到傳神的記錄�(16)在亙久的凝視中 希望 我們對生命 更有趣的理解 得以發生

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