The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 2013, 73, (271-287) © 2013 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/13 www.palgrave-journals.com/ajp/ FORMS OF CONCERN: TOWARD AN INTERSUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVE Rami Tolmacz The growing interest in the issue of concern, which appeared relatively late in psychoanalytical literature, resulted in several distinctions. Winnicott distinguished between concern as an expression of guilt and concern as a manifestation of joy, Brenman Pick distinguished between real concern and spurious concern, and Bowlby distinguished between sensitive and compulsive caregiving. The basic concepts of Buber's dialogical philosophy and intersubjective approaches in psychoanalysis have created fertile ground for the study of concern, and enabled us to conceptualize these distinctions in a way that has heretofore been lacking in psychoanalytical thought. KEY WORDS: capacity for concern; meanings of concern; healthy and pathological concern; patterns of concern; intersubjective perspective. DOI:10.1057/ajp.2013.14 A theory of intersubjectivity premised on the dynamic unconscious intersubjective flow of affect, identification and recognition between people means that care is the psychological equivalent to our need to breathe unpolluted air. (Hollway, 2006, p. 11) Children have the compulsion to put to rights all disorder in the family, to burden, so to speak, their own tender shoulders with the load of all the others; of course this is not only out of pure altruism, but is in order to be able to enjoy again the lost rest and the care and attention accompanying it. (Ferenczi, 1933, p. 166) Coincidences are standard fare for people who find themselves wrapped up in study of a particular subject over a long period of time. As I was thinking of the topic of concern, a number of incidents caught my attention. The first related to Knut, the first polar bear born at the Berlin Zoo in years, that Rami Tolmacz, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist; Lecturer at the Interdiscilinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. Address correspondence to Rami Tolmacz, Ph.D., School of Psychology, The Interdisciplinary Center, P.O. Box 167, Herzliya 46150 Israel; e-mail: trami@idc.ac.il