Intersubjective systems theory is the view that personal experience always emerges, maintains itself, and transforms in relational contexts. It is held for reasons of personal inclinations, philosophical belief, and clinical conviction. As a clinical sensibility, it primarily includes an emphasis on the emotional convictions or organizing principles that systematize experience, the personal engagement of the analyst, and the refusal to argue about reality. Key words: intersubjective; system; psychoanalysis; fallibilism; reductionism; phenomenology; experience; contextualism; hermeneutics We grace our beliefs by calling them theories. (Emmanuel Ghent) Why is intersubjective systems theory so compelling for me? First, a few words are provided about this psychoanalytic approach. This theory examines the field-two personal worlds of experience in the system they create and from which they emerge-in human development and in any form of psychoanalytic treatment. Because of this focus, intersubjectivity theory also implies a contextualist view of development and of pathogenesis, describes the emergence and modification of subjectivity (the experiential world), and defines all these processes as irreducibly relational. The observational/participatory focus is the evolving psychological field constituted by the interplay between the differently organized experiential worlds of child and caregivers, patient and analyst, and so on. Informally, it means I am always trying not only to describe experience (yours, mine, and ours) in this temporal-relational context but also to understand in what relational contexts we became the people who participate and experience as we do
