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Donnel Stern, to highlight what is well known, is one of the founding, significant voices of relational psychoanalysis, that movement in psychoanalysis that organizes itself around the recognition that what happens in an analysis—what is possible, what is ruled out, what goes well, what goes wrong, what is said, what remains implicit—is a function of the relationship between analyst and analysand. Stern's 2003 monograph, Unformulated Experience, is bound to be a classic in the relational literature. His new book, Partners in Thought, gathers together a subsequent set of papers. It carries forward from the earlier work the elaboration of the relational model and the core idea of unconscious experience as unformulated experience. What it adds is the theme of the relationship between dissociation and enactment. As a set of essays, the book does not develop an argument gradually over the course of its chapters but is instead, as its author describes it, “a collection of various approaches to the relationship of dissociation and enactment” (p. xiii).
The sort of bare-bones theoretical argument that can be gleaned from the book is as follows: The unconscious is not constituted by formed and then repressed meanings. Rather, the unconscious is unformulated experience; unformulated experience is dissociated experience; dissociated experience is potential experience, experience that has not been actualized, that has never been symbolized. Certain sectors of a particular person's experience may be strongly defensively dissociated. These are “not-me,” in the idiom Stern adopts from Harry Stack Sullivan. Not-me is what a subject cannot tolerate, cannot bear to find in him- or herself. The threat is such that the subject refuses to allow formulation of these possibilities. When what is dissociated threatens to become conscious, the result, in treatment (and out, one assumes), is enactment. Enactment is the interpersonalization of dissociation (p. 14). It functions to insist, “It i