Reply to Stern

ONE OF THE THINGS that delights me about Donnel Stern's discussion of my paper is that it expands our sense of mystery. He states: “We know no more about where our everyday, unremarkable, reflective experience comes from than we do where thought transmission or clairvoyance does.” This sentence, at once astonishing and obvious, recaptures a sense of wonder in the workings of the mind, something we usually take for granted. And then further on: “The obdurate strangeness of dreams has always been reassuring to us.” At first, I hesitated before this statement, remembering the multitude of times I struggled to find THE meaning, any meaning, in a dream in order to justify my claim to expertise. At those times, I felt far from reassured. But then, he goes on, “it shows us that the mystery of experience survives all our interpretations, preserving the possibility of meaningful futures we never know to expect.” Our focus is shifted to those times when we thought we had an interpretation of a dream, when we thought we had our hands around the elusive wild thing. It slithers out of our grasp, as long as we don't turn dogmatic, ending the inquiry. But then Stern makes another astonishing leap: he reminds us that the “obdurate strangeness” of dreams preserves “the possibility of meaningful futures we never knew to expect.” The very potential of psychoanalysis to transform a life depends on the continually regenerating elusiveness of experiencel This line of thinking reminds me why psychoanalysis (and Eastern spiritual traditions) appealed to me in the first place. Way back in high school and college I was fascinated with inklings and intimations, with the sense of transcendent significances just beyond the horizon. Stern's writing stimulates that sense of wonder, as does some of the recent psychoanalytic writing that brings together psychoanalysis and nonlinear dynamic systems theory (e.g., Sander, 2002; Ghent, in press). When this latter writing points to the “self-organizing”