This article looks at the problem of intersubjectivity, that is, how it is possible that a person can come to subjectively understand the subjective experience and larger state of another person, focusing almost exclusively on how this problem is addressed in qualitative studies using the “Participant as Ally—Essentialist Portraiture” methodology and Cooley’s principle of “sympathetic introspection.” The first four sections illustrate some of the features of the essentialist approach that lead to such understanding. For example, the investigator focuses on larger holistic impressions she gets from particular “significant” passages that she regards as giving a sense of the participant’s consciousness and nature as a person (Section 1). The last two sections argue that practice of essentialist portraiture suggests that there is in everyone’s self, in her “I,” a level where there is a subtle understanding of the consciousness and being of every possible “being a human being.”
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