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What do we ideally look for in a psychoanalytic book? Speaking for myself, and I hope also for others, I would say we want a book that resonates deeply with what we already think we understand about what we do, but that extends our conceptual horizons in a way that continually surprises us with its originality while also striking us as inevitable, and indeed something we have always known, once we have had a chance to digest and metabolize what the author is saying.
Such a book, in my judgment, is Steven Stern's splendid addition to the Psychoanalysis in a New Key series. Initially, I must confess, I was not bowled over by the title. “Needed relationships”? It sounds almost banal. “Psychoanalytic healing”? Of course, that's our stock-in-trade. The subtitle can hardly be called poetic and seems at first glance to be plodding rather than inspired. On closer examination, however, I have come to appreciate that each word is carefully chosen and that the ensemble distills, in Erikson's phrase, Stern's “way of looking at things”—that is, what he, like all of us, ultimately has to offer his patients and the world.
Indeed, with the seemingly modest concept of “needed relationships,” Stern seeks to do nothing less than rise above the hubbub of competing theoretical discourses in contemporary psychoanalysis to construct an overarching framework for thinking about both the clinical process and the state of our field as a whole. The gist of Stern's position is what might be called an extreme nominalism, in the sense that while he agrees with Stephen Mitchell, for example, that all patients come to us seeking “a new relational experience uniquely fitted to their therapeutic needs and which contrast[s] in critical ways with the traumatizing experiences