Intersubjectivity Theory

There is a telling remark that Eleanor Longden makes during here recent TEDTalk.

 "Fourteen minutes is not enough time to fully credit those good and generous people who fought with me and for me and who waited to welcome me back from that agonized, lonely place. But together, they forged a blend of courage, creativity, integrity, and an unshakeable belief that my shattered self could become healed and whole."

Without knowing it, Longden had just describe "Intersubjective Systems Theory" (IST). IST "proposes that minds are not isolated, unitary things that exist as individual entities, as though in a vacuum. Rather, minds exist within interpersonal and intersubjective relationships, beginning at birth (and even before) with the attachment bond to the mother, and they develop within interpersonal, intersubjective, relational contexts." 

George E. Atwood, Robert D. Stolorow, and Donna M. Orange are the core theorists of intersubjective systems theory.These theorists, all of whom are practicing psychoanalysts, have rejected the Cartesian version of self as a unitary, isolated entity, and have likewise rejected mental illness as an intrapsychic dysfunction. In their model, which relies heavily on phenomenological philosophy as its explanatory foundation, the patient's troubles (excluding organic disease or physical trauma) exist only within the experiential and relational contexts in which they developed. 
http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2012/05/intersubjective-systems-theory-in.html

http://intersubjectivite.com/drupal/files/Stolorow,%20Robert%20-%20Dynamic,%20Dyadic,%20Intersubjective%20Systems,%20An%20Evolving%20Paradigm%20for%20Psychoanalysis.pdf

Contrast this approach with the another therapeutic experience Longen describes"

"... I was part of a student TV station that broadcast news bulletins around the campus, and during an appointment which was running very late, I said, "I'm sorry, doctor, I've got to go. I'm reading the news at six." Now it's down on my medical records that Eleanor has delusions that she's a television news broadcaster."