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In The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Daniel Stern, expanding on his work with the Boston Process of Change Study Group, deconstructs the intimate therapeutic encounter. Present moments, as Stern describes them, bring to mind the field of nanotechnology, an area of science concerned with the smallest building blocks of matter, atoms and molecules.1 According to Stern, present moments, like atoms and molecules, represent the smallest coherent units of conscious emotional experience. They are the building blocks of psychological life. Attention to present moments stands in dramatic contrast to the larger and broader foci of much traditional psychoanalysis: interest in the patient's past, in the symbolic and verbal articulation of experience, and in the formulation of sweeping life narratives. Present moments require, instead, a narrow and intense focus. Of very short duration, lasting only a few seconds and operating in the nonverbal and implicit realm of experience, present moments function as the molecular structure of human subjectivity and emotional relationship. They constitute the smallest