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This book continues Donnel B. Stern's study of unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment as defined in his previous works. Relational Freedom illuminates not only his theory of mind as it exists in the field, but also some personal aspects of his career. “Because I am a psychoanalyst, it is axiomatic for me that my own deepest intentions, like anyone's, are simply not rational” (p. 46), he writes. For Stern, “therapeutic action depends on our freedom to allow ourselves novel, unbidden experience” (p. 113).
Stern recalls:
When I was a candidate in the latter half of the 1970s, many, probably most, psychoanalysts of that era's mainstream believed
Page 488that interpersonal psychoanalysis was too much concerned with “environmental” or sociological issues, and too little interested with inner life, the intrapsychic, the unconscious, or the mind. [p. 47]
As a reviewer of Stern's clear, passionate compilation, I think it is only fair to “out” myself as one who was also a candidate in the 1970s at one of those mainstream institutes (Chicago) and who was embracing Kohut at the time, but certainly not the interpersonalists. Reading Stern's still-painful recall of that political era when the American Psychoanalytic Association regarded interpersonalists as heretics feels shameful to me. Contrasting that time to the present day, Stern acknowledges, “Our theoretical differences no longer inspire the contempt of one group for another and/or the wholesale dismissal by the powerful of the view of those who are less powerful” (p. 166).
Today field theory and relational analysis are discussed in even the most conservative institutes. In this book, Stern takes a unique tour of the contemporary psychoanalytic landscape that compares and contrasts his own way of thinking to those of contemporary Freudians, object relationalists, Bionian field theorists, self psychologists, dynamic systems, and others. His ability to articulate and explain complexity and distinctions among often diffic