Donnel B Stern
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4491848 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Donnel B Stern |
| PRENOMES | Donnel B |
| SOBRENOME | Stern |
| ASSINATURA | STERN D B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | William Alanson White Institute |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 32 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 115 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 32 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1983 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
What does “unconscious” mean? Unformulated experience and the interpersonal field
The occasion of delivering a plenary presentation at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association offered me the opportunity to make a summary statement of my lifelong work on the theory of unformulated experience and the interpersonal field. The first half of this paper presents the original form of the theory. The second half introduces changes made in recent years, as the focus of the theory shifted from the place in psychoana…
Estados Hipnoides, la Estructuración de la Mente y la Comprensión Interpersonal/Relacional de la Disociación
Hypnoid States, the Structuralization of Mind, and the Interpersonal/Relational Understanding of Dissociation
Intersubjectivity, Field Theory, and Adrienne Harris’s “You Must Remember This”
Adrienne Harris’s “You must remember this” has attained classic status, and for good reason: It is one of the most elegant and brilliant statements of intersubjectivity in the psychoanalytic literature. After reviewing the accomplishment of the article, I offer some ancillary thoughts on field theory
Beginning the Treatment on a Personal Note
Psychoanalysis reflects the minds of its creators and is an ethical practice in the sense that the theories with which we psychoanalysts identify are those that reflect what is most important in life to each of us. I present autobiographical material that points to the personal sources, even earlier than my psychoanalytic training, of my conviction that the creation of emotional connection between two actual persons lies at the heart of psychoana…
Commentary
Commentary on Markman’s Vignette
Distance And Relation
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 track of the necessity to “set the other at a distance” (Buber), the prerequisite for emergence from …
Interpretation
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, knows the patient more than before the interpretation was made. As a result of this process of “witness…
F rom I nterpersonal F ield to M ind in the W ork of P hilip B romberg
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
On Coming Into Possession of Oneself
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, happens when we not only know or feel something, but also, and simultaneously, sense ourselves in the mi…
Philip M. Bromberg (1931–2020). Trauma, dissociation, and the multiple self
That intimacy and depth of relatedness were so precious to Philip Bromberg, even his central truth and purpose, is perhaps an irony, because he was a shy person, not given to demonstrativeness, cer
Thinking Absence
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 in work with states of mind that allow representation. I end with a discussion of the application o…
Field Theory and the Dream Sense
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 to what the two schools of field theory share
The Dream Sense, Emergent Clinical Process, and the Question of Symmetry
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 necessarily the basis of interpersonal and relational clinical practice, and then take issue with Brow…
Dissociative Multiplicity and Unformulated Experience
A Magic World
How Does History Become Accessible? Reconstruction as an Emergent Product of the Interpersonal Field
Infinity of the Unsaid
Unformulated experience, dissociation, and Nachträglichkeit
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 meanings remain unformulated. The route of clinical access to frozen time is the interpersonal field: to…
Relational Freedom
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. Stern never considers the analyst or the patient alone; all clinical events take place between them and …
A response to LaFarge
LaFarge and I come from two different North American psychoanalytic traditions. Mine, interpersonal psychoanalysis (and, starting in the 1980s, relational psychoanalysis), diverged in the 1930s fro
Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning
Relational Freedom and Therapeutic Action
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 does it mean for the formulation of experience to be free? In the frame of reference adopted here, the …
Witnessing across Time
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 vitalization of the present by the past or the past by the present requires that experiences be lin…
Relational Freedom
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. Stern never considers the analyst or the patient alone; all clinical events take place between them and …
Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning
Relational Freedom and Therapeutic Action
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 does it mean for the formulation of experience to be free? In the frame of reference adopted here, the …
Partners in Thought
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 is crucial in psychoanalytic treatment, not only because it expands the boundaries of the self, but …
Witnessing across Time
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 vitalization of the present by the past or the past by the present requires that experiences be lin…
On Coming Into Possession of Oneself
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, happens when we not only know or feel something, but also, and simultaneously, sense ourselves in the mi…
Unformulated experience, dissociation, and Nachträglichkeit
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 meanings remain unformulated. The route of clinical access to frozen time is the interpersonal field: to…
Interpretation
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, knows the patient more than before the interpretation was made. As a result of this process of “witness…
Distance And Relation
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 track of the necessity to “set the other at a distance” (Buber), the prerequisite for emergence from …
Words and Wordlessness in the Psychoanalytic Situation
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 relations between consciousness and the unconscious, and each implies a position about the nature of l…
Commentary
How Does History Become Accessible? Reconstruction as an Emergent Product of the Interpersonal Field
Unformulated experience
In this powerful and wonderfully accessible meditation on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, Donnel Stern explores the relationship between two fundamental kinds of experience: explicit verbal reflection and unformulated experience, or experience we have not yet reflected on and put into words. Stern is especially concerned with the process by which we come to formulate the unformulated. It is not an instrumental task, he ho…
Unformulated Experience
Unformulated experience
In this meditation on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, Donnel Stern explores the relationship between two fundamental kinds of experience: explicit verbal reflection and "unformulated experience," or experience we have not yet reflected on and put into words. Stern is especially concerned with the process by which we come to formulate the unformulated. It is not an instrumental task, he holds, but one that requires opennes…
Unformulated experience
In this powerful and wonderfully accessible meditation on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, Donnel Stern explores the relationship between two fundamental kinds of experience: explicit verbal reflection and unformulated experience, or experience we have not yet reflected on and put into words. Stern is especially concerned with the process by which we come to formulate the unformulated. It is not an instrumental task, he ho…
Words and Wordlessness in the Psychoanalytic Situation
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 relations between consciousness and the unconscious, and each implies a position about the nature of l…
Partners in Thought
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 is crucial in psychoanalytic treatment, not only because it expands the boundaries of the self, but …
Partners in Thought
Building on the innovative work of Unformulated Experience, Donnel B. Stern continues his exploration of the creation of meaning in clinical psychoanalysis with Partners in Thought. The chapters in this fascinating book are undergirded by the concept that the meanings which arise from unformulated experience are catalyzed by the states of relatedness in which the meanings emerge. In hermeneutic terms, what takes place in the consulting room is a …
Witnessing across Time
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 vitalization of the present by the past or the past by the present requires that experiences be lin…
More Meaning
Relational Freedom and Therapeutic Action
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 does it mean for the formulation of experience to be free? In the frame of reference adopted here, the …
A response to LaFarge
LaFarge and I come from two different North American psychoanalytic traditions. Mine, interpersonal psychoanalysis (and, starting in the 1980s, relational psychoanalysis), diverged in the 1930s fro
Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning
Relational Freedom
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. Stern never considers the analyst or the patient alone; all clinical events take place between them and …
Unformulated experience, dissociation, and Nachträglichkeit
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 meanings remain unformulated. The route of clinical access to frozen time is the interpersonal field: to…
How Does History Become Accessible? Reconstruction as an Emergent Product of the Interpersonal Field
Infinity of the Unsaid
A Magic World
Thinking Absence
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 in work with states of mind that allow representation. I end with a discussion of the application o…
Field Theory and the Dream Sense
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 to what the two schools of field theory share
The Dream Sense, Emergent Clinical Process, and the Question of Symmetry
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 necessarily the basis of interpersonal and relational clinical practice, and then take issue with Brow…
Dissociative Multiplicity and Unformulated Experience
Philip M. Bromberg (1931–2020). Trauma, dissociation, and the multiple self
That intimacy and depth of relatedness were so precious to Philip Bromberg, even his central truth and purpose, is perhaps an irony, because he was a shy person, not given to demonstrativeness, cer
F rom I nterpersonal F ield to M ind in the W ork of P hilip B romberg
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
On Coming Into Possession of Oneself
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, happens when we not only know or feel something, but also, and simultaneously, sense ourselves in the mi…
Commentary on Markman’s Vignette
Distance And Relation
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 track of the necessity to “set the other at a distance” (Buber), the prerequisite for emergence from …
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