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Dear Sir,
I want to draw attention to another framework that may help clarify what Stern et al. call ‘moments of meaning’. These moments can be conceptualized as double binds. The double bind, as Gregory Bateson defined it, is the result of two conditions: 1) the context for communication contradicts its content: and 2) the recipient of the communication cannot comment on this contradiction. The familiar example is the mother who tells the child, ‘I love you’, with glaring eyes, or the parent who with a faint sneer offers to help a child with her homework. The glare, the sneer, are the cues that stimulate what Stern et al. call ‘relational knowing’. These cues, which establish the context for communication, contradict the content of the communication; in these examples ‘I love you’, ‘I can help you’. The child cannot comment because she fears the parent. The resulting unremarked contradiction stimulates strong feelings.
Bateson derived his conception from Bertrand Russell's theory of logical types in which one statement is a category marker for a whole set of statements. Thus the statement ‘All the barbers in France’ is a category marker for ‘Jean’, ‘Henry’, ‘Luc’, etc. ‘All the barbers in France’, is of a higher logical type than ‘Jean’, or ‘Henry’. Russell argued that certain familiar paradoxes are resolved if we do not mix statements of different logical types in a single proposition. (‘If the barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself, who shaves the barber?’)
Consider the vignette that Stern et al. present. Molly, the patient, says to the analyst, ‘I have the image of you sitting back and watching me from some superior position’. She then goes on to wonder if, when she was a child, her parents derived sexual pleasure from watching her dance. She concludes with, ‘I wonder if you're looking at me’. Stern et al. note that as the analyst works through her feelings she identifies ‘the related issues of dominance and realized that she felt as if she were being in