Donnel B. Stern: Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment

Abstract

The subtitle of Donnel Stern ' s new book includes the essential concepts that constitute his view of what he calls the " relational-dissociative " school of psychoanalysis. Unformulated experience, dissociation and enactment are his terms of engagement that substitute for the classical analytic terminology of unconscious, defense and resistance.Going beyond terminology what he offers the psychoanalytic reader in this complex and challenging volume is nothing less than a new and different version of psychoanalysis in terms that encompass both theory and technique. While it is hardly unusual to fi nd a relational school analyst like Stern moving away from the spirit, terminology and technique of classical psychoanalysis the elaborated content of his approach contains elements that are both surprising and controversial even for those analysts who are either partially or completely relational in their approach to clinical work.As is the case with relational psychoanalysts, Stern, advocates for a less authoritarian stance on the analyst ' s part. It is important to him that an analyst accept that she (Stern refers to the analyst as " she throughout the book " ) is uncertain, even confused about both what she is looking for in the patient, hence, the process must be spontaneous to allow for a creative process to occur in which the analyst and patient together are able to fi nd new understanding. This is his message that is expressed as " partners in thought " a phrase meant to indicate that the content of an analysis is co-constructed by both the analyst and patient. He adds to this the awareness that the context for determining content is always the analytic dyad. The ideal dyad, in Stern ' s view, is one that depends heavily upon negotiation. In order to support his concept of negotiation, Stern turns fi rst to the philosopher Gadamer and his rules of conversation. Gadamer ' s philosophy of conversation in Stern ' s synopsis of it includes an insistence that the listener must submerge his own perspective or self in order to understand that of the other.Stern ignores or at least underplays the signifi cance of turning to Gadamer to justify the shift in analytic perspective that negotiating to truth or reality in analysis involves. Unlike Kohut who made a similar shift to a position of empathic listening and immersion on the basis of his clinical experience, Stern appears to be appealing to the authority of a philosopher who is refl ecting on the nature of communication in a more general setting than that involved in analysis. The ability to hear the other person ' s communication over one ' s own thoughts, opinions and feelings may be more applicable in diplomatic negotiations than in the consulting room. While the stance, frequently found in classical analysis, that elevates the analyst ' s assertion of what the patient is really experiencing is obviously unpleasant and often defeating

Editorial: Innovative studies in organized helping: transforming relations, emotions and referents through sequentially structured practices

“…Many contributions to this Research Topic also demonstrated how the relationship between the participants is managed and transformed, as the relationship is one of the principal factors contributing to change in the client. Investigating psychoanalytic individual therapy, Herrera et al relied on the concept of "moments of meeting" (Stern, 2009) and discussed how such an interactive moment that transforms the relationship between therapist and client is sequentially accomplished through a practice that the authors term "co-animation." In this interactive sequence, the client expressed and exercised her own agency and assumed an active role that is ratified and supported in the therapist's response.…”

Interpretation: Voice of the Field

“…Significant compromises of the freedom of thought and feeling-compromises of the freedom to experience, we could say-are the results of unconsciously mediated regulatory processes growing from participants' unconscious need to maintain some minimum level of mutual affective comfort in one another's presence. It is the field that embodies these affective regulatory processes, partly by bringing some self-states "onstage" from each mind and sending others back into the wings to await their next appearance (various statements of this view can be found in Stern 2010Stern , 2015Stern , 2019b. The shift of self-states in and out of consciousness on the basis of interpersonal context reminds me, on the one hand, of Bromberg's use of the metaphor of the stage in his dissociation model of the mind as multiple self-states (1998,2006,2011) and, on the other, of Ferro's metaphorical embodiment of the changing context of experience as the "casting" of new "characters" (e.g., 2009).…”

“…But when the field's freedom is compromised-when the field is constricted or rigidified in a way that stifles the requisite degree of spontaneity, allowing a narrower range of experiential alternatives-then only certain parts of the analyst's and patient's minds can be known or felt by the analyst, and the depth and breadth of the understandings available to the analyst for communication to the patient are correspondingly diminished. These episodes of constriction in the field have been referred to for decades now as mutual enactments, especially in the relational literature (Stern 2004(Stern , 2010(Stern , 2015Bromberg 2006Bromberg , 2011. Enactment stifles freedom of thought and makes interpretation impossible: the voice of the field is silenced.…”

Review of Listening with the fourth ear: Unconscious dynamics in analytic group psychotherapy.

“…Transferences are pasted onto the other, whether it is the therapist, other group members or the group as a whole and treatment involves the interpretation of these transferences so that the patient can return to and live in consensual reality. There is yet to be a reflection on the hermeneutic and creative dimension of group process wherein enactments can be understood as narrations of past traumas, dissociated and unformulated states (Stern, 1997(Stern, , 2010 and attempts to begin the process of representation of experience that has happened but is yet to be given shape and suffered.…”