Two Minds are the Only Ones: A review of Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment by Donnel B. Stern. New York:  Routledge, 2010,  229 pp.

Donnell Stern is a central figure in American psychoanalysis. More than a major American contributor to international psychoanalysis, he is a key voice in what might arguably be viewed as an American psychoanalytic tradition that stretches back to Harry Stack Sullivan, a literature with insights into psychopathology and analytic process that is equally important, and in some ways similar, to those found in the writings of D. W. Winnicott and Wilfred Bion. The subtitle of his new book, Partners in Thought, summarizes the foci of his life's work: unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment.

Because a near-cult formed in response to Bion's notions of beta and alpha elements (i.e., his theory of unmentalized versus more mindful thinking), it is easy to overlook that awareness of this distinction goes back to Freud and Sullivan. In 1915, Freud wrote: “The conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone” (p. 201). Sullivan (1954), who is Stern's primary source, conceptualized a “not-me” state of being (or what we now call a “self-state”) in which the person wards off alpha-ing, articulating, or formulating experiences that are literally inconceivable and unthinkable without destruction of the self. Philip Bromberg also resurrected and elaborated Sullivan's notion and his and Stern's work forms another cornerstone of the American literature, which, I argue, runs equal and parallel to the literature created by Winnicott and Bion.

Turning his attention, in this new volume, to dissociation and enactment, Stern differentiates dissociative enactments from projective and