Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue

The recent focus on mutual recognition in contemporary psychoanalysis has several roots: infant research, self psychology, feminism, Hegel, and Winnicott. This article argues that recognition is best understood as a type of acknowledgment and acceptance of our mutual vulnerability in the treatment process. It also suggests that resituating Winnicott's “use of an object” in the larger context of his work reframes it as the exception rather than the rule, and shifts the destruction approach to recognition toward an appreciation approach.