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Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment is Donnel Stern's follow-up to an earlier very interesting and important first volume of his.1 In the present work, he extends his exploration of the relationship between dissociation and the theory of multiple self-states to the conceptualization of enactments, and continues to explore the implications for psychoanalysis of social constructionism and hermeneutics (the latter as particularly advanced by Gadamer2).
At the core of Stern's argument is the belief that “relatedness is the nexus from which experience emerges” (p. 4)—that is, that all unconscious meaning is emergent and relationally determined rather than preformed and hidden. While this view allows for a wide degree of plasticity in terms of what any given element of experience, internal or external, might be seen to mean, Stern is careful to add that not just any meaning is possible. Meanings are restricted in their range by the limits of reality, past and current, by what has come before (preexisting structures of meaning), and by the emergent influence of the present (relational) moment (p. 2).
What Stern is most concerned with clinically are the meanings that are imputed and constructed about one's state or sense of self. Thus, he repeatedly stresses the point that only those perceptions that we can stand to know about ourselves can reach the level of formulation and emerge into awareness. In this he closely follows the work of Sullivan, who organized his observations of clinical data around those self-states and self-perceptions that could be comfortably tolerated and those that could not. In Sullivanian language, which Stern adopts, these self-states and self-perceptions are designated me and not-me, respectively. This formulation provides a pragmatic tool for parsing and observing clinical