Donnel B. Stern - Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field

First published 2015

by Routledge

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2015 Donnel B. Stern

The right of Donnel B. Stern to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Stern, Donnel B.

Relational freedom: emergent properties of the interpersonal field /

Donnel B. Stern.

pages cm

Field theory (Social psychology) 2. Interpersonal psychotherapy. I. Title.

HM1033.S747 2015

150.1984dc23

2014044705

ISBN: 978-1-138-78840-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-78841-1 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-76557-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

I remember feeling, even as a graduate student seeing my first patients in the early 1970s, that the clinical process took place between the patient and me, and that my experience and the patients were not only our own, but also parts of a larger whole. In my first book (Stern, 1997), Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis , I recently reread a description of the interpersonal field. It brought back to me those first experiences of that sense of the clinical situation and reminded me of how long the interpersonal field has been central in my mindlonger, even, than I have known it by its name. Here is the passage.

A fully interpersonal conception of treatment is a field theory. The psychoanalytic relationship, like any relationship, takes place in a field that is defined and ceaselessly redefined by its participants. It is not only the intrapsychic dynamics patient and analyst bring to their relationship that determine their experience with one another. The field is a unique creation, not a simple additive combination of individual dynamics; it is ultimately the field that determines which experiences the people who are in the process of co-creating that field can have in one anothers presence. It is the field that determines what will be dissociated and what will be articulated, when imagination will be possible and when the participants will be locked into stereotypic descriptions of their mutual experience. Each time one participant changes the nature of his or her involvement in the field, the possibilities for the other persons experience change as well....The field is the only relevant context.

(p. 110)

Now jump ahead with me nearly two decades, from 1997 to this year. As I reviewed the articles I have written over the last few years, which make up the bulk of this book, I saw that my interests in the recent past, like the more distant past, have revolved around the interpersonal field, and I began to see that the chapters of this book organized themselves around this theme.