Abstract
Donnel Stern is one of the most prolific theorists and ambassadors for the interpersonal tradition within contemporary relational theory. Stern’s latest work, On Coming Into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field, continues this legacy by summarizing and extending interpersonal field theory. Stern discusses how field theory interacts with closely related theories, and he forges relationships between field theory and its cousins, dissidents, and those with whom many mainstream psychoanalytic theorists have rarely attempted an acquaintance, such as Lacan, Derrida, and South American theorists.
Stern organizes his book according to three main sections: (a) an elaboration of the formulation of experience in the clinical situation, (b) interpersonal field theory and the concept of dissociation, and (c) a comparison of field theory with adjacent streams of thought. Each chapter in the book comprises chapters, papers, or presentations originally published or presented elsewhere. Consistent with his thesis that all experience must be understood according to its context, Stern provides introductory comments explaining the original occasion for each piece of writing appropriated for inclusion in the book.
While each chapter was engaging, I struggled to decipher a major unifying theme of the work as a whole. Given my admiration for Stern’s ideas and his strengths in synthesizing complex theory, I would have welcomed Stern’s efforts to more systematically synthesize the main points of his work. However, each of Stern’s chapters is thought provoking and challenged me to reconsider my own work from a different perspective. The first two thirds of the book might be read as an updated summary of Stern’s conception of interpersonal field theory. Historically, Stern conceived of the analytic enterprise as formulating unformulated experience. While itself an innovative and fruitful conception of the psychoanalytic task, such a rendering may neglect formulations that occur in treatment in the absence of words. No longer restricted to purely linguistic modes of formulating the unformulated, Coming Into Possession of Oneself is Stern’s latest iteration of this theme, now inclusive of embodied and procedural dimensions of experience.
Stern’s current thesis emphasizes the need to make personally meaningful the array of one’s experiences. It might help to think of Stern as now shifting the focus of his inquiry from the state of experience (formulated or unformulated) to whether or not experience has personal meaning. In shifting his focus in this way, Stern refines his theory to better capture the essence of what constitutes the psychoanalytic aim and objective. Only when experience is personally meaningful, regardless of its particular state of formulation, does experience become available for use in the service of authentic spontaneous living that is the hallmark and aim of analysis from the interpersonal perspective.
In describing this revised conception of unformulated experience and its vicissitudes, Stern elaborates the ways traditional concepts might be understood differently when seen through an interpersonal lens. For example, the unconscious is celebrated as a source of meaning rather than merely an obstruction to it. Instead of the unconscious, Stern advocates a model of mind in which unconscious material is seen as a continuously unfolding interpersonal process shaped by contributions from both analytic participants. He believes more traditional Freudian and Kleinian notions of the unconscious as a storehouse of unconscious phantasies reify a static entity more firmly structured and insulated from the reality of outside influence. For Stern, any conscious understanding is, itself, a rigidification of the optimally malleable interpersonal field. Stern locates his own theory, alongside other thinkers with similarly optimistic views of the unconscious, as a process that is ultimately generative, including Loewald (1978), Bion (1962), and Ogden (2019).
Stern’s model of analytic participation is much more expansive than traditional conceptions. Stern sees meaning not as a product of intrapsychic unconscious phantasy contained in the individual and waiting to be uncovered by the analyst via interpretation, but as something that grows from the relatedness between the unique patient/analyst pair, a product of the shared interpersonal field. Sustained emotional connection between the pair is essential, and the mutual ability to participate in the analytic field with as much freedom and spontaneity as possible is fundamental to health.
Stern sees psychopathology as the lack of freedom to inhabit the multiple self-states we might otherwise inhabit in order to relate to experience more spontaneously and authentically. Stern likens the variety of discomforting self-states we might inhabit to a preponderance of “not me” (p. 176) experience, a Sullivanian reference (Sullivan, 1953). Stern’s appreciation for Sullivan is something he has carried throughout his work and one that continues in this book. The collapse of the freedom to relate creates areas of rigidity and frozenness in the interpersonal field, and it is precisely the aim of analysis to help “dissolve” (p. 1) and “thaw” (p. 183) those areas of rigidity in order to make them available to experience. The ability to claim as one’s own whatever aspects of one’s subjectivity are populating the field at any given time is a cornerstone of what Stern elaborates as coming into possession of oneself.
A particularly unique aspect of Stern’s work is his more radical interpersonal perspective on interpretation. For those already familiar with Stern’s work, Stern’s ideas about interpretation might feel like a restatement of Stern’s earlier ideas on the matter rather than something new. For Stern, interpretation is not a vehicle for change but the outcome of an otherwise invisible change in the field that has already occurred. This follows from his model of the mind as interpersonally constituted. When a place in the field becomes frozen for the patient, so too does the analyst’s capacity to participate, and both participants register this frozenness as a restricted capacity for emotional connection. Whatever interpretive comments ensue are seen as responsive to an interpersonal field that has been freed up.
Instead of making the unconscious conscious via the mechanism of interpretation, Stern’s conception of therapeutic action is broader. Coming into possession of oneself, relating to experience as belonging to oneself, involves a process of moving from a relation to experience previously dissociated as exclusively “not me” (p. 176) toward a relation to experience as one’s own, what Stern coins “feels like me” (p. 107) experience. Therapeutic action requires the act of witnessing, something Stern elaborates at length in the chapter sharing the book’s title. Through witnessing, we allow our patients to feel how we see them. It is this felt experience of being witnessed by the other that enables the self to take possession of that which was dissociated. Thus, for Stern, a much wider array of analytic participation than interpretation becomes theoretically relevant, meaningful, and even necessary.
The efficacy of interpretation resides not primarily in its semantic content but in its function with respect to the field, its relational properties. Interpretations emanate from embeddedness in the interpersonal field. Thus, they do not belong to any one participant. Since the goal of treatment is to create new possibilities for emotional connection rather than achieving insight, attending to these rigidities as they emerge and by whatever means available becomes the foundation for clinical technique. When a successful interpretation seems to pave the way for thawing frozenness and restoring movement in the field, it is due to the patient’s experience of being recognized. Similar to Benjamin’s (2018) emphasis on the new relation to oneself attained through recognition, Stern notes that the interpersonal dimension of witnessing is central to helping people come to possess that which was previously dissociated.
More radical than most traditional understandings, however, is Stern’s emphasis that even the analyst remains unsure of the meaning of her interpretations. Because it is the field between both members that gives rise to various forms of the analyst’s participation, the particular meaning and result of whatever form of analytic participation may not be fully known by either participant. In other words, for Stern, analytic interventions arise in response to changes in the field unbeknownst to, and actually unknowable by, either participant.
What exactly accounts for the changes in the field ultimately constituting therapeutic progress from this perspective? Stern attributes therapeutic action only to unknowable unconscious changes in the field and insists that whatever aspects of each partner’s subjectivity influence changes in the field remain fundamentally mysterious. For Stern (2004), it is the “unbidden” (p. 208) shifts in the field, the “snags and chafing” (p. 208) in the analyst’s subjectivity, that alert her to important areas of frozenness in the field. Not only interpretation, but plausibly any variety of clinical attention to these areas, may yield therapeutic fruit.
It seems knowledge of psychoanalytic theory and technique become an almost vestigial organ in Stern’s way of thinking, a product of one’s psychoanalytic heritage that might be dispatched with little to no negative consequences. While Stern explicitly accords merit to interpretive activity and to the analyst’s knowledge of theory and development, it is difficult to see how, exactly, such knowledge becomes clinically efficacious or even relevant to the success of the treatment despite Stern’s explicit acknowledgment to the contrary.
While many analysts sympathetic to Stern’s ideas will surely resonate with his appreciation for the mysterious regarding the analytic process, others less inclined toward interpersonal thought might balk at what feels like a sobering and anticlimactic description of our efforts to effect change. This aspect of Stern’s theory might feel deflating for those expecting him to shed light on more specific mechanisms of therapeutic action, and perhaps disheartening for those eager to learn how to employ technique from this perspective.
In contrast, Stern’s treatment of nuanced moments of interaction and the clinical information they contain are admirable. Stern, for example, gives an example of a rather banal clinical moment between him and his patient, Alan. The nuanced tone of Alan’s voice in response to an interpretation and the particular context within which it was said become a node from which an entire inquiry is elaborated. Much significance is discovered, and Alan is seen as contributing equally to what becomes a pivotal understanding between Alan and Stern, marking a significant change in trajectory for the treatment. While such nuances often either escape notice or are given short shrift by other perspectives, Stern highlights the complexity and depth that such moments can yield when approached through the lens of interpersonal field theory.
Even for those less inclined toward interpersonal theory, Stern’s illustrative account of the nuanced influence of each partner’s contribution to the process of interpretation is persuasive. For those less willing to accept the entire interpersonal tradition’s platform, Stern’s account sheds light on the unforeseen ways the influence of each participant shapes the process of interpretation. Stern must be respected for his detailed elaboration of precisely how interpersonal factors play out in the process and his assertion that interpretation is, indeed, best seen as a process rather than a discrete event.
After reading this book, I found myself in sessions wondering more specifically what interpersonal factors might have made possible the interpretation I made, or even privately considered. This opened my view to aspects of the interpretive process I had previously either neglected or dismissed as irrelevant. This itself seems an example of the expansion of the interpersonal field Stern so eloquently champions.
Whether you ultimately agree with the tenets Stern is advancing in On Coming Into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field, one has the feeling of reading the work of a master theorist and clinician. Stern is optimistic and generous in his thinking, regularly crediting thinkers and traditions from which his own thought emanates, aspiring to integrate his ideas with those who think similarly, and precise in distinguishing his ideas from those with whom he disagrees. This work is erudite without being pretentious, and original but with humility and wisdom.
