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From its beginnings, psychoanalysis has located itself in relation to the broadest array of sources, ranging from the fine arts, through politics, culture, and history, to the sciences. Freud was explicit about the value of consilience with other fields, especially the natural and physical sciences. However, in the century since its inception, analysis has become less certain about its links to adjacent fields. Shifts in scientific paradigms, especially in physics and neurobiology, have disproven some of the assumptions on which the original Freudian metapsychology was based. Meanwhile, analysis has established itself as an independent, largely clinical discipline, and philosophical and political currents, from hermeneutics and feminism, for example, have dislocated some of the original methodological certainties. Over the years, updates have been offered, with varying success.
Daniel Stern has been in the forefront of this project. Most psychoanalysts think of him as a leading developmentalist, rather than as a cutting-edge metapsychologist. Taken as a whole, Stern's work proposes a flexible, clinically resonant analytic model of mental life rooted in direct contact with lived experience, based in the actual body, emotions, and what is happening moment to moment both within and between minds. This all leads to lively meaning-making and meaning-processing, integrating life processes from basic levels as small as cells and neurotransmitters, through intermediate processes such as movement and emotions, to collective social and cultural forms such as language and the arts. This project draws directly on the contemporary scientific disciplines closest to psychoanalysis: neuroscience, developmental and cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts.
Few psychoanalysts have taken on such a broad range in regard to what they have sought to theorize. Not surprisingly, Freud was the most ambitious. Two developmentalists tackling broader questions, Erikson and Winnicott, have