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The relational nature of mind and therapeutic process is suggested by the increasingly generative collaboration between developmental researchers and clinicians. Close observation of infant-parent interaction provides new hard data on which to base hypotheses about therapeutic process. Relational ideas, especially from these sources, have often been less immediately obvious to clinicians. Sitting in the relationship, the clinician finds it hard to experience the relationship as much as he or she experiences the patient. Intrapsychic models tend to make sense from the analyst's vantage point. With the model of early infant-parent interactions, relational patterns become more intuitively obvious, understandable, and compelling.
This is what Daniel Stern and his colleagues (Sander, Nahum, Harrison, Lyons-Ruth, Morgan, Bruschweiler-Stern, and Tronick)— as well as others in the relational/developmental movement like Lichtenberg, Seligman, and Beebe and Lachmann—have been trying to help us with, conceptually, over the past two decades. In his latest book, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Stern attempts something akin to Freud in the Project—a model of intersubjective consciousness and interactive behavior, based on biological research findings. In effect, Stern is going back to fill in scientif ically and conceptually around ideas presented in his contributions with the Boston Change Process Study Group, beginning with the widely read “Non-interpretive Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy: the ‘Something More’ than Interpretation” (Stern et al. 1998). Many of us read this paper, saying, “Of course, we always knew there was another channel of communication. Glad to have someone point it out.” But Stern was saying something more radical, that the second channel is at least as important as the verbal, interpretive one.
In the 1998 paper Stern proposed that alongside the familiar processes of free association, resistance, transference, and interpretation t