Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment, by Donnel B. Stern,  Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, New York and London, 2009,  229 pp.

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 find 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 find 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 first 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 hi