Something Old, Something New: Commentary on Steven Stern's “Needed Relationships”

Steven Stern's paper provides a rich overview, critique, and integration of major currents within recent psychoanalytic theorizing. I appreciate the incisiveness, breadth, and complex texturing of his synthesis, and I also agree with most of it. The dialectic between the old and the new in the analytic relationship, the central problem around which the paper revolves, has been one of the major wellsprings of creative analytic imagination, and Stern returns from this well with much that is thought provoking, fresh, and challenging.

Stern correctly locates my work in the same general ballpark as his own integrative efforts but finds my perspective a bit imbalanced. He sees me as having overcorrected for the overcorrections of the developmental theorists and not giving enough weight to the importance of thwarted developmental needs as they emerge in the analytic relationship.1 Therefore my work is tilted toward what he terms Model I, emphasizing repetition in the transference and not as truly integrative as the perspective he offers.

The issues here are so complex it is not at all clear to me where the real differences are between Stern and me. His balanced integration is based on his particular way of defining the two lines of theorizing. I