January 5, 2026
The Inner Architecture of People-Pleasing
Part Three: Intersubjectivity, Mutuality, and the Challenge of Meeting
We feel when connection is alive.
Two people fall into an easy rhythm while working together. A conversation flows and sentences are finished before they’re spoken. You and someone you love dream the same dream. Something is happening between rather than owned by either person.
It can show up in therapy too. A shared somatic sensation — a tightening in the chest, or a drop in the shoulders, an exhale. A client’s metaphor echoes something the therapist had been holding.
These moments are often described as intersubjectivity and mutuality.
In psychoanalytic theory, intersubjectivity is the broader term for relational embeddedness. Writers such as Robert Stolorow describe an intersubjective field, the co-created space in which experience takes shape between one or more conscious beings.
A familiar analogy comes from documentary or journalism: observing something changes it. The old philosophical question, if a tree falls in an empty forest… points to the same idea. There is no neutral position.
Intersubjectivity is a condition of psychic life. It does not guarantee warmth, recognition, or understanding. Intersubjective experiences can be everything from transcendent to pleasant, misattuned, even traumatic.
The umbrella of intersubjectivity also includes mutuality. In the work of relational theorists such as Jessica Benjamin, mutuality names a state rather than a constant, where two people are able to remain present as separate subjects while also being in contact with one another.
While intersubjectivity is always operant, mutuality is not.
Most relational difficulty lives in the conditions that make mutuality possible or get in its way.
Three ways mutuality collapses
In clinical work, I tend to see mutuality break down in three recurring ways.
These patterns are most visible in people who already value closeness and put effort into maintaining relationships. They are not the primary ways connection erodes for those less invested.
Each involves a different kind of loss: loss of the self, loss of the other, and loss of the field between them.
1. Loss of the self: self-abandonment
The first breakdown in mutuality occurs when one person disappears in order to preserve connection. This can look like prioritizing the other’s needs over one’s own experience, staying outwardly attuned at the cost of self-awareness, or editing oneself into erasure.
Connection may be maintained, but only one subject is present.
2. Loss of the other: anxiety and projection
The second interference shows up when anxiety replaces contact. Instead of encountering the other as they are, we begin responding to what we imagine they feel, need, or want.
The other person’s authentic subjectivity can be hard to locate. Our own noise can drown out the other’s signal.
3. Loss of the field: collapsing into harmony
The third dissipation happens when difference is smoothed over pre-emptively, disagreement is softened or denied, and the fertile negative space between people is eliminated.
Forms of adaptation—including code-switching, modesty, or limited self-disclosure—are often useful and healthy. They can also impede deeper meeting.
When difference is managed away in order to preserve closeness, we lose the space necessary for recognition.
What changes as this becomes visible
Attending to these patterns may already be a shift. Mutuality depends on the presence of two subjectivities, neither disappearing, dominating, or smoothing the field into sameness.
Mutuality cannot be forced, willed by one person, or sustained indefinitely without constant re-finding. When we let it, it sometimes occurs. Noticing the contexts in which it does can deepen how we relate.