Donnel Stern

• New York University

To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the contents of the analyst’s interpretations, but the feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful not because of what they say but because each one is evidence that the analyst, who generally becomes someone of great significance to the patient, kno...

Inspired by an essay by Martin Buber (1950), and then by the work of Ernest Schachtel (1959) on the idea of “embeddedness” and emergence from it, this essay is an account of the role of “distance” or “separateness” in clinical psychoanalytic work. We tend to assume that the capacity to appreciate otherness is always already present. We often lose t...

Présentation de l’article par les traducteurs 3 : À l’occasion du décès de Philip Bromberg qui était un collaborateur et ami personnel de l’auteur, celui-ci présente le personnage et expose ses idées originales sur la pratique analytique. Il s’agit du courant dit de l’école interpersonnelle, dont l’inspirateur est Levenson. La menée de la cure est...

In this brief essay I describe in a very condensed way what is, to me, the heart of Philip Bromberg’s work: the creation of the mind from the affectively charged events of the interpersonal field, and the rootedness of therapeutic action in the analyst’s emotional responsiveness to the enactment of the patient’s structuralized dissociations.

In this paper I use clinical theory and illustration to explore details of the formulation of experience, which depends upon the metamorphosis of experience from not-me to feels-like-me. I take the position that the movement from not-me to feels-like-me, with the accompanying possibilities for formulating new meaning that open at such moments, happ...

Donnel Stern and I met in the spring of 2016, when I was a fourth year candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He had begun teaching a new course there in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis. I soon became fascinated with the contrast between the relational perspective and the classical one; the latter was more familiar to me fr...

Dieser Artikel ist der erste Teil eines Essays über das Thema ›Distanz‹, den ich auf Einladung der Herausgeber des Jahrbuchs für Psychoanalyse für diese Ausgabe verfasst habe. Die Definition des Begriffs ›Distanz‹ wurde mir freigestellt. Ein Aufsatz von Buber (1951), den ich vor langer Zeit las, inspirierte mich, in psychoanalytischen Begriffen die...

The invitation extended to me by the Editors to contribute to this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, centered on embodiment, made me realize that I had never explicitly addressed the subject. And so in this essay, without contextualizing my thoughts about embodiment in the large, existing literature on the topic, I begin to think through the relatio...

Freedom in the interpersonal field is defined by the degree of latitude patient and analyst have to relate to one another without the kinds of constraints introduced by unconscious defensive purposes. Rigidities in the field lead to stereotyped, destructive interactions and constraints on the freedom to create the future. Changes in the field are c...

This paper is a continuation of the comparison of interpersonal/relational theory and Bionian field theory that I began in two articles that appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialoguesin 2013 (Stern, 2013a,b). The paper has two sections. In the first, I discuss differences between Bionian field theory and interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis. In th...

After a brief review of the way I conceptualize clinical process, I present a case example to illustrate it. I begin with a brief theoretical presentation, to orient the reader for the longer clinical case example that follows. The theory, my conceptualization of unconscious process, is the variety of field theory that I have been developing for so...

This paper is a continuation of the comparison of interpersonal/relational theory and Bionian field theory that I began in two articles that appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2013. The paper has two sections. In the first, I discuss differences between Bionian field theory and interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis. In the second, I turn...

In recent years I have become interested in Bion and neo-Bionian field theory, but the origin of my interest in dreaming does not lie in scholarly or clinical sources. The source of the idea of the dream sense is my own experience. After addressing that point, I reject what appears to be Colombo’s impression (this issue) that detailed inquiry is ne...

I begin by discussing the nature of the negative in McGleughlin’s paper (this issue), offering some examples of my own from the films of Kubrick and Malick. I go on to address how the negative can be a relational conception, as I read McGleughlin to suggest, and the role of destabilization as a clinical process in work with the negative, as well as...

I begin with a brief theoretical presentation, to orient the reader for the longer clinical case example that follows. The theory, my conceptualization of unconscious process, is the variety of field theory that I have been developing for some years. The theory grows from the idea of unformulated experience, according to which the unconscious is co...

Donald Trump lies so often that some have wondered whether he has poisoned the well. Can we continue to defend the constructivism of relational psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on interpretive understanding? Might it not be claimed that this is actually the very approach Trump himself takes? Does an openness to interpretive understanding allow any...

I describe the development of my views from interpersonal psychoanalysis, a development I hold in common with many other relational analysts. I still consider myself both. Both the background from which I grew and the differences we early relational analysts had with standard psychoanalytic technique are described. In the second part of the article...

The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is an interpersonal/relational psychoanalytic account of some relationships between dissociation, time, and unformulated experience. Trauma, and the dissociation to which trauma leads, freezes time, which makes it impossible to formulate certain kinds of new experience. Instead, potential new mean...

Interpersonal psychoanalysis is not well known outside the northeastern United States, yet it has been present since the 1930s and has influenced psychoanalysis all over the world. In this article, the origins of interpersonal psychoanalysis are described, providing at least a partial explanation for this widespread ignorance. Interpersonal psychoa...

North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. The Interpersonal Pers...

These brief remarks introduce the symposium on Power and Authority, with clinical material by Francesca Colzani and discussions by Irwin Hoffman, Susanna Federici Nebbiosi, and Gillian Straker. I am glad we have the opportunity in this symposium to discuss power and authority in the clinical situation, because while this subject has been a center o...

Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field addresses the interpersonal field in clinical psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, especially the emergent qualities of the field. The book builds on the foundation of unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment defined and explored in Stern's previous, widely read books. Ster...

Today the concept of the interpersonal field, while seldom credited to those who created it, is widely used in psychoanalysis. After reviewing how the concept of the field defines interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, I take up the rejection of the idea in American mainstream psychoanalysis in the decades just after it was proposed by Sulliv...

I try to capture what Sirote (this issue) did to make his unusual case as successful as it was. The most important factors, it seems to me, are Sirote’s directness, emotional aliveness, and responsiveness to his patient—a combination that reminds me of what Levenkron (2006) brings together as “affective honesty.”

Relational analysts know that their experience feels private and contemplative during a significant portion of their working hours. A consideration of the inner life, both the analyst’s and the patient’s, is part of relational praxis. Yet relational analysts also recognize that they are continuously involved with their patients, even at those very...

This article is the second part of an examination of field theory in psychoanalysis. In this article, contemporary Bionian field theory, primarily the work of Antonino Ferro, is compared with contemporary interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis.

I offer responses to the discussions of my paper written by Ferro and Civitarese, Carnochan, Peltz and Goldberg, and Levine.

This is the first of two articles comparing conceptions of the field in interpersonal/relational psychoanalysis (IRP) and Bionian field theory (BFT). This article compares the thinking of the originators of IRP and BFT, Harry Stack Sullivan and Madeleine and Willy Baranger.

I knew that writing a comparison of two points of view in psychoanalysis would be difficult when I proposed this project. But I didn't know how difficult. It was one of the hardest writing tasks I have ever had. The difficulty of the task, though, is interesting, at least in retrospect, because I believe that in it lies a hint of why the comparison...

Therapeutic action depends on our freedom to allow ourselves novel, unbidden experience. How does this novelty arise? What is the process by which some portion of the possibilities inherent in any moment's unformulated experience are created or selected and emerge in consciousness? And what does it mean to think of freedom in this context? What doe...

I argue that because psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are emergent processes and the expression of values, a hermeneutic perspective is necessary to study them. I present some basic aspects of one significant perspective of this kind, that of Hans-Georg Gadamer. We have no choice but to recognize that objectivism is the dominant mode of thought in...

A good interpretation contributes to the patient's feeling of being witnessed or recognized. Recognition is an affective experience, not a matter of truth value, so that the truth in an interpretation, while it may be necessary to the recognition, is not sufficient. In fact, since interpretation is hardly the only form in which recognition can be c...

We are used to the idea that trauma in the past interrupts our capacity to grasp the present. But present or recent trauma can have a similar dissociative effect on our capacity to experience the more distant past. Contemporary trauma can rob the past of its goodness, leaving one feeling as if the past is gone, dead, separated from the present. The...

When the editor of this issue invited me to write about technique, I found myself drawn to a general consideration of the nature of technique, rather than to an overview of my own views about how to practice. This article concerns what seems to me to be the inevitability of multiple and implicit theories of technique in psychoanalysis. We are conti...

I discuss the relatedness with certain hard-to-engage patients as a kind of dissociative enactment, and I present a case illustration of a man whom I liked but could not help.

In this discussion of Eyal Rozmarin's “To Be Is to Betray,” I focus, along with Rozmarin, on the reconciliation of guilt and love, the embeddedness of our individual lives in the social world, and the significance of ethics in the creation of the kind of liberation that psychoanalysis can offer.

Comparing the clinical practice of contemporary Freudian analysts with that of Interpersonal/Relational analysts, I focus on the difference between primary reliance on continuous participation in, and reflection on, mutually constructed, unconscious clinical process (the Interpersonal/Relational view) and primary reliance on the interpretation of u...

Comparing the clinical practice of contemporary Freudian analysts with that of Interpersonal/Relational analysts, I focus on the difference between primary reliance on continuous participation in, and reflection on, mutually constructed, unconscious clinical process (the Interpersonal/Relational view) and primary reliance on the interpretation of u...

Even in the absence of others, we learn about ourselves by imaginatively listening to our own thoughts through the ears of the other. At the beginning of life, we need a witness to become a self. Later, patients listen to themselves as they imagine their analysts hear them, and in this way create new narrative freedom. The resolution of enactments...

How does the ideal psychoanalytic institute deal with the divergence of ideas? We should teach the desirability of both the accretion of ideas and of the revolution against them. The sum of these two paths is curiosity, a demanding ideal.

Even when trauma can be remembered, the memory does not infuse the present with vitality or emotionality, as other memories do. To become a vital part of experience, trauma must be linked with other current experiences. Such links are metaphorical, in the sense meant by Lakoff and Johnson (1999)17. Lakoff , G. and Johnson , M. 1999. Philosophy in...

How does the ideal psychoanalytic institute deal with the divergence of ideas? We should teach the desirability of both the accretion of ideas and of the revolution against them. The sum of these two paths is curiosity, a demanding ideal.

I discuss the work of the Boston Change Process Study Group, focusing on the paper in this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, but also addressing broader issues across the range of their work. After describing the considerable similarities between their views and mine, I focus on three areas about which I have questions: the concept and clinical us...

I use dissociation and the concept of the multiple self to link Mitchell's profound insight with Goldner's critique. In the process, I use the idea of dissociation to think about the nature of different kinds of long-term relationships.

Interpersonal and Relational psychoanalysis are large theories, umbrella theories, so that there is often as much disagreement within them as there is between them. The only answers to the question of how to untangle the relationship of the two theories with one another are the answers of individuals, and even then the answers depend on context. So...

Levenkron begins with the thesis that the analyst is never outside of enactments between herself and her patient. The analyst must enage these enactments with affective honesty, and this must be done during the sessions within which the events in question occur (i.e., in the heat of the moment, without necessarily being able to formulate the releva...

The author posits that Pizer's use of both narrative and lyrical style is not typical in psychoanalysis, whose scholarly tradition tends to favor a denser, more academic style of writing. The ways in which psychoanalysts read these two forms of writing are mirrors of one another. Both kinds of reading are forms of discipline; both forms of writing...

The author posits that Pizer’s use of both narrative and lyrical style is not typical in psychoanalysis, whose scholarly tradition tends to favor a denser, more academic style of writing. The ways in which psychoanalysts read these two forms of writing are mirrors of one another. Both kinds of reading are forms of discipline; both forms of writing...

The case of Peter is discussed from an interpersonal/relational perspective emphasizing dissociation, enactment, and the emergence of authentic psychoanalytic responsiveness from unformulated experience.

Part I of the paper takes up the question of how it is possible for the analyst to see, experience, or understand the countertransference, which is exactly what her unconscious involvement with the patient blinds her to. Must the eye perform the impossible task of seeing itself? A clinical vignette illustrates the problem. The means by which we gen...

Part I of the paper takes up the question of how it is possible for the analyst to see, experience, or understand the countertransference, which is exactly what her unconscious involvement with the patient blinds her to. Must the eye perform the impossible task of seeing itself? A clinical vignette illustrates the problem. The means by which we gen...

All understanding is context dependent, and one of the most significant contexts for clinical purposes is the self-state. How we understand the other, and ourselves, depends on the state(s) we occupy. Dissociations between an analyst's self-states can, therefore, limit or impede understanding of the analysand by depriving the analyst of a fitting c...

The difference between words and wordlessness in the psychoanalytic situation is examined in the context of a detailed clinical example. Various pairs of terms that have been used to account for this difference are mapped onto it: word and act, thought and feeling, public and private experience. Each of these sets of differences suggests certain re...

Scharff takes a consistent interpretive stance with her patient, the purpose of which is to maintain her analyzing capacity and her ability to contain the patient's projective identifications and detoxify them. From an interpersonal/relational perspective, the analyst is continuously involved in unconscious mutual enactments with the patient, and t...