Practicing Intersubjectively

Book excerpt: A 2006 Gradiva Award recipient, Practicing Intersubjectively describes how the intersubjective systems perspective guides the psychotherapeutic process. With judiciously chosen extensive clinical case material, Peter Buirski illustrates how the intersubjective system's sensibility enriches clinical practice via its formulation of the treatment process as considered to be "context sensitive"-meaning that the intersubjective field co-constructed by a patient-therapist pair is viewed as distinctly different from the field created by any other pair. Such a perspective unfolds a different therapy process from the one that occurs in traditional one-person, authority-based treatment approaches, and is uniquely suited to treatment of people from diverse cultural backgrounds and those suffering from the effects of trauma and prejudice.